Visual Artists Sue Google
Thursday, April 8th, 2010 by Patrick Ross
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If you get your hands on 18 million books you don’t own, make full copies of them, and look to profit from them online, expect a bit of legal trouble. Google’s latest headache is from photographers and illustrators. You go, visual artists!
Let me say up front that while the Copyright Alliance didn’t play a part in the development of the March 7 class-action suit against Google by photography and graphic arts organizations and individual photographers and graphic artists — and the Copyright Alliance hasn’t been involved in the Google Book Settlement pending in court — but I have myriad professional and personal connections among the visual arts plaintiffs. Disclaimer below.
You can read a press release on the suit here, and this is The New York Times’ take on the case (I believe they had the story first).
It’s not a surprise, really. The Google Book Settlement stemmed from a class-action suit by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Authors’ Guild against Google for massive infringement. (AAP is a Copyright Alliance member.) Whatever you may think of the settlement in its various iterations, one thing that has never been denied — it’s spelled out clearly in the settlement language and has been affirmed by the judge weighing the settlement — is that parties that weren’t party to the original class action are not a party to the settlement.
That left visual artists on the sidelines. They petitioned to join the settlement, and the judge basically said, “No, but you can file your own suit.” And they have done so.
There’s another party explicitly excluded from the settlement — songwriters and their music publisher partners. Song lyrics in books typically are licensed, and of course there are printed musical scores aplenty. It will be interesting to see if those parties also file their own class-action suit.
The plaintiffs in the April 7 suit can point to specific cases in which books from a multitude of libraries who had loaned their books to Google for scanning had images scanned without authorization. That’s a fact that even Google can’t argue with. Now Google’s argument that scanning 18 million books without the permission of the rightsholders involved in those books is “fair use.” A few million of those books were in the public domain, but imagine how devalued copyright would be if a corporation can make a copy of every single copyrighted work without permission with the possibility of monetizing them. Essentially copyright ceases to exist, but that wouldn’t be any great loss to the “public interest” groups that supported Google’s original scanning and legal defense in the authors’ class action suit, or of course it’s the ultimate desire of Google and its outspoken copyright counsel.
Who knows where this will lead, but my heartfelt congratulations to visual artists across the U.S. for banding together and suing the most powerful global corporation in the online world today in defense of their rights.
DISCLOSURE: Four of the plaintiff organizations — the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), the Professional Photographers of America (PPA), the Picture Archive Council of America (PACA), and the Graphic Artists Guild (GAG) — are Copyright Alliance members. PPA served on our board in 2008, ASMP does currently. In addition, I consider two of the individual plaintiffs friends. Leif Skoogfors, an accomplished photographer, spoke at the May 2007 launch of the Copyright Alliance and is active in our one voi(c) grassroots network. John Schmelzer and I have connected due to his tenure as president of GAG. He has been featured at our 2008 and 2009 EXPOnentials on Capitol Hill. Perhaps more importantly to me, this masterful illustrator with decades of professional experience has served as an informal mentor to my daughter, an aspiring visual artist. He gave her some valuable lessons at last fall’s EXPO, so valuable she says she learned more over those few hours than she has in dozens of hours of classroom instruction. My favorite piece of advice from John to my daughter? He had her sketching EXPO attendees, and she complained about how hard it is to sketch candids of individuals because they keep moving. Emphasizing the need to develop speed, John told her “If you want to sketch still people, sketch cadavers.”
April 8th, 2010 at 8:18 am
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April 8th, 2010 at 12:21 pm
[...] John Schmelzer, President of the Graphic Artists Guild, for his personal and professional support. Read the blog post and the “Disclosure” remarks about Mr. Schmelzer at the Copyright Alliance’s [...]
April 10th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Good morning, Patrick
As usual, you did a great job writing this article. As you know, I share your passion for this particular subject matter, as my youngest daughter just headed off to art school this past fall, as well. It will take some effort on all of our parts to insure that both of our daughters have a fair and even playing field on which to compete … and the ability to earn their livelhood in the graphic arts arena we all love so dearly, in the digital age.
While I see that four (4) Copyright Alliance members are among the eleven (11) “named plaintiffs” in this new class action lawsuit against Google, I am blown away by all of the significant companies, organizations, and individuals who were apparently not contacted at all before this select few annointed themselves as the “leaders of the class”.
In my view, this could be VERY dangerous, especially if the judge denies certification of the class status due to insufficient research, representation, organization, and planning on the part of those sprearheading these efforts.
Just as an example, I sit on the boards of five (5) different companies in the digtial graphic arts industry. Each of these organizations owns and/or controls the licensing of well over 10,000 copyright-registered clipart illustrations and designs. Designs from each of these companies have been found to be infringed by various scanned book and/or e-book publishers (such as Google) over the past 18 months. How could it possibly be that ALL five of these significant “visual arts” indsustry-leading organizations were never even contacted by the assocations, organizations, or individuals who put this class action case together?
Are there hidden agendas here that I am unaware of, Patrick? You know how hard I try to avoid anything “political”!
Within the past few days, I have spoken with the executive directors of twelve (12) other visual arts organizations (most of which represent digital illustrators, cartoonists, and designers) who were never contacted, as well.
A coordinated “group” action such as this against Google is long overdue. I have been telling you this for years. Let’s just hope these people (the curently “named Plaintiffs”) get their act together quickly before the case is rejected, thus making subsequent attempts to achieve justive in this regard even more difficult to accomplish.
Nice article. Fun for me to see you display more passion. Please keep up the great work!
George Riddick
Chairman/CEO
Imageline, Inc.
griddick@imageline2.com
April 11th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
You’re nuts. Any company should be allowed to make copies of works without permission for internal use, even with the ultimate motive of profiting. Google’s display of the copyrighted books to the public would not have violated copyright, which is all that should matter. Their internal scanning was a necessary step, and negotiating with, essentially, every author and publishing company on earth could not have happened.
We can either have a universal library or not. I’d rather we did, and Google’s approach is the only feasible way to get there. The settlement is dumb; Google should have litigated this to the teeth.
Cost/benefit, people.
April 20th, 2010 at 1:48 am
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