Google bashing? No, but some truth-telling.

I heard after the SLA conference that a few people felt we had done some Google bashing in the session "Wikis, Tweets, and Blogs, Oh My" about social media and copyright. (blog post) I don't think we did, but here's what I remember us talking about in regards to Google...

Michael Moynihan, Senior Editor for Reason Magazine, talked about Google "Scholars" at the start of his remarks. He wasn't bashing the Google product, but instead was talking about those people who base their knowledge on the search results returned in Google without conducting further research. These "scholars" (and we use the term loosely) may believe in and propagate misinformation, making it more difficult for the truth to be apparent.

I was asked to comment on the Google Book Search settlement. While it is a topic that I've written about and am tracking (see Related Posts below), I feel as if I don't know all of the nuances of the settlement. (Keith Kupferschmid, Senior Vice President for Intellectual Property Policy at SIIA agreed that there is much to understand in the document and felt that most had not read the entire thing, but were relying on the commentary of others.) My main point in my comment was that Google is a for-profit company that is involved in many areas including software and hardware development, search engines, content creation, and marketing & promotion, etc. While we are the beneficiaries of their efforts, they have their own best interests in mind (and those of their stockholders), not ours. Moynihan also spoke briefly about the complexity of the agreement and its impact. Thankfully there are people and organizations who are delving into the details and filing amicus briefs (friends of the court documents) in order to bring more voices and concerns to the table.

I don't remember other mentions of Google; however, I'm sure that the audio/video of the session -- once online -- will bring any other mentions we made to light.

Related posts and articles:

• Society of Ohio Archivists Annual Conference (What We Are Learning From Google & Flickr About Digitization and Partnership)
• Brewster Kahle weighs in on the Google Book Search settlement
• More information on the Google Book Settlement and how to opt out
• Rights holders have a limited time to opt out of the Google settlement
• Article: The End of Snippet View: Google Settles Lawsuit with Book Publishers
• More on the Google settlement: Is it all good?
• More on what the Google Book Search settlement means (and my vision of Google's future)
• Article: Is Google Deal a Setback for Rival Digitization Efforts?

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Technorati tags: Copyright, Google, SLA2009

Wikis, Tweets, and Blogs, Oh My!

Yesterday I participated in the session entitled "Wikis, Tweets, and Blogs, Oh My!" at the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.. The other people on the panel were:

• Michael Moynihan, Senior Editor, Reason Magazine (title corrected 6/21/2009)
  
• Keith Kupferschmid, Senior Vice President, Intellectual Property Policy, SIIA
• Laura Malone, Associate General Counsel, The Associated Press

The session was moderated by Christopher Kenneally, Director, Business Development, Copyright Clearance Center. The session was video recorded and I expect that excerpts will be available on the Beyond the Book podcast and perhaps the entire session will be available elsewhere.

The session focused on the copyright concerns that are occurring with social media. We talked about illegal use of copyrighted materials as well as "tolerated use". For example, it is illegal to copy an entire Associated Press (AP) news article and place it in your blog without explicit permission from the AP. It is legal to quote snippets from a news article with a link back to the original article, along with additional content from you (e.g., criticism or commentary).

"Tolerated use" is an interested gray area. The example I gave is that I will republish entire conference announcements in my Digitization 101 blog because I know that those announcements are meant to be widely disseminated even though they are technically copyrighted. The organization that created the announcement sees that as "tolerated use". Yes, I have infringed on the organization's copyright, but they tolerate it because of the benefit that they are receiving. Tolerated use is not law. In this specific case, I could argue that my use complies with the four factors of Fair Use under U.S. law:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (A commercial benefit is received by the original organization and not by Hurst Associates, Ltd.)
   
2. The nature of the copyrighted work (An announcement meant from broad distribution)
   
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole (The entire announcement)
   
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work (The use does not effect the value of the copyrighted work, since the copyright work is an announcement and not something that is for sale.)

We also touched on the idea of attribution and I wish we could have explored this topic more. I stated that in some cases, if someone uses my words, I may be okay with it if I receive proper attribution. For example, if I say something on Twitter that is repeated by others (retweeted), then I would hope that I would received credit (attribution). This is a very, very hard concept to articulate, especially since what is tolerated is defined on a case-by-case basis. I think this is something I need spend more time thinking about so I can articulate my tolerance and concerns better.

All in all, this was a very interesting session and I'm glad that I was invited to be one of the panelists. Once any podcast and video from this session goes online, I'll post a note letting you know where you can find it.

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Technorati tags: SLA2009, Copyright