Thanks Richard for pointing out the scandalous lack of discussion of the google agreement. The agreement could mire the university in expensive lawsuits that it is likely to lose. Even if there were no lawsuits, many members of the university would object in principle to wholesale violation of copyright.

At the time, there was some discussion that Summers was trying to secure himself a position on google's board.
 

Hooray! I logged in.

Richard, how about sparing us the vague ominousness and telling us what is "profound and problematic" about the desire to render searchable and quickly available to scholars all the texts in the library?

I'm sure there's truth to what you say from a LEGAL standpoint; but surely you don't think Harvard or Google is going to jump the gun and commit massive intellectual theft without due caution in the contracts and courts?

It seems likely to me that as an author yourself, you're in the ee-ninesy demographic of people who would like to be partners in a negotiation like this, but have SOLD THEIR PLACE AT THE TABLE to their publishers. Yes, your publishers might (horrors!) sell to university libraries the intellectual-property rights they bought from you; but they paid for them for and square, and you sold them. That's the Faustian bargain one strikes in seeking publication. Unless authors begin to unionize, 'twill always be thus -- at least, UNTIL other modes of publication come into place that allow for much cheaper publication and therefore more direct negotiation between consumers of ideas and producers of them.

That last clause is meant to suggest that Google is in the long run the good guys here -- which should be especially clear to people like yourself who understand that Internet publication of ideas (and, in the case of SITD, of innuendo) can change the economy of authorship.

That's my read of the long-term situation, anyway, for whatever it's worth.

In the shorter term, the question is legal (does, and SHOULD, copyright law be structured to incentivize work by protecting monopolies on ideas even from the university communities to whom they are often targeted, and for whom they are MEANT to be free through library systems? Does added convenience for library clients fundamentally change what a university library is doing with copyrighted texts?), and, on the other hand, cultural.

The cultural question is simple: will intellectual communities understand that copyright is a legal institution, centered on DOLLARS, and not an intellectual one? With footnoting, intellectual "theft" is at the heart of scholarly work itself. Copryight shrivels away immediately when a citation appears.

If scholarly institutions choose not to understand that profit motives do not apply to the vast majority of things that appear in university libraries (on the contrary, scholarly publishing is academia's loss leader), they will be making a category mistake. They will let legal categories created for a literal economy of dollars govern their thinking about the figurative economy of ideas -- in which the proper currency is not material wealth, but respect and engagement with one's printed work. (The likelihood of this category mistake happening in a full-faculty Harvard discussion, the most target-rich environment *in the world* for the tiny subset of professors who also DO happen to have a profit motive, is infinitely higher than anywhere else in academia. --Which is not to say it shouldn't be discussed in the full faculty, only that the library is the library and should make its own decisions with the input of the university's governance structures. This is not a pure democracy.)

In choosing not to understand the UNIVERSITY-based issue, because some people who write or publish trade books call things "profoundly problematic" without saying why, academia will be showing that it is content to be for the time being, both in its thinking and in its product, HIDEBOUND.

Top-notch wordplay free for the reading here, on the Internet, facilitated by Google, and created with no thought of lucre by

Your servant,

Standing Eagle


PS. I didn't click the link but I have no doubt that the legal issues (read: $$$$) that you invoke are thorny ones. Nonetheless I think the intellectual concerns should be more important for professors to discuss.
 

SE,

For a further consideration of the issues raised by the Google library project, take a look here:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2005-10-17-google-print_x.htm
 

"Verba may not have known what he was getting into—or what he was being pressured to do. As he later told the Times, "It's become much more controversial than I would have expected. I was surprised by the vehemence." "

Richard,
You misread this quote to make it serve your own purposes. Verba is clearly NOT saying that he didn't know what the agreement entailed; he is saying that he didn't foresee how strongly Harvard faculty would react to it.

Again, though, professors are not party to this transaction. Their vehemence should be directed to their publishers.

Leadership is however needed (along with transparency! for why not?) to communicate with all stakeholders -- in the metaphorical sense. The stakes for professors, they should be brought to understand, are intellectual, not financial. A University president should take as a primary role the task of guiding the school and its constituents to discuss (and even vote) with their brains and not their wallets. (Summers was bad at this, in part because his vision for the school also happened to be quite a lucrative one.) It would truly be a shame if the only university voices to be heard on this topic are from the few people with "skin [cf. the Latin vellum -- i.e., greenbacks and hardbacks] in the game."

Lead on, Drew Faust!

SE
 

SE,

I stand by my interpretation of the quote. If Verba fully realized the implications of the Google project, then he wouldn't have been surprised by the "vehemence" of the response to it.

RB
 

"If Verba fully realized the implications of the Google project, then he wouldn't have been surprised by the "vehemence" of the response to it. "

Not necessarily so. He might not have understood that the implications for professors' WALLETS might be more important than the implications for their ideas. (A particularly understandable mistake for a LIBRARIAN to make -- and a more likely one, since librarians are constantly working on copyright-related transactions, and budgets, and dealing with publishers, and so on.)

There's more than one way to be taken off guard, and it might be your neighbors who disappoint/surprise you and not your negotiating partners.

I think my interpretation is much more reasonable given what Verba actually said -- that he was surprised by the vehemence of the REACTION.

Sidney? Out there and interested in making a Verba-l intervention?

SE
 

I don't know, Richard. As a regular user of the Harvard library system, I can confidently say that the Google project has benefited my research. The benefit of searching through the text of books, rather than hunting for keywords, is immense. Copyrighted books are not available on the Google or Harvard library sites, only works that have already entered the public domain. Those books under copyright can only be viewed a handful of pages at a time, enough to get a sense of the material but not enough to keep me from hiking on over to Widener and getting the book off the shelf. Where's the threat to intellectual property?