Friday, November 15, 2013

20131115.0619

During this morning's readings, I stumbled across Jonathan Stempel's 14 November 2013 Reuters article "Google Defeats Authors in U.S. Book-Scanning Lawsuit."  In it, Stempel reports upon the decision by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Author's Guild against Google which had claimed that much of the Google Books project violates copyright law.  The court ruled that Google's current practice falls under the fair use doctrine, in which short excerpts of a work may be used by someone other than the copyright holder of the work.  Stempel reports also that continued legal action is forthcoming, as well as noting the implications of the case for works in other media than print.

How to integrate source material, and how much of it to use, is a concern for me in both major components of my work: teaching and research.  I have addressed the former once or twice before (albeit a while back); one of the things that I have to do as a teacher of composition courses is discuss with students how to incorporate the ideas of others into their own work--correctly and responsibly.  It is not enough to simply cut and paste the words of others into another paper, and it is really not enough to put that text in quotation marks.  More must be done to massage the data into the writer's own expression of understanding.  As to the latter: I have to do much to ground my understandings of literature in the literature itself, which means have to do a fair bit of quotation and the like.  I also have to account for the understandings of those scholars who have gone before me, which ends up meaning the same thing.  Appropriately enough, then, when I saw a reference to a copyright case involving a major media provider which I use extensively (this webspace is a Google offering, after all), my interest was piqued.

As I note above, much of my work as a professor involves the effects of the fair use doctrine.  I am therefore invested in seeing it upheld and substantiated; its diminishment impairs my ability to do the work I have trained to do (if it can be called work).  At the same time, the frequency with which I am cited impacts how I am regarded as a scholar.  Too, as someone who does have creative work out in the world, and actually in print, I entertain the hope that I will be able to someday make a bit of money from my writing, and it occurs to me that the decision may well make it more difficult for authors to benefit from the dissemination of their works.  It takes thought to write, energy to think, food to get energy, and money to get food, so that if readers want writers to write, they need to buy what the writers write (the same is true for other media; piracy is generally bad).  And it seems to me that the snippets Google offers are ripe for copy-paste jobs by students.  How I ought to regard the court decision and what result I should hope to see from the promised appeals Stempel mentions elude me--which strikes me as a good thing.

It promotes thought and self-reflection, and both are good to have of a morning.

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