For more than a year, I’ve been attempting in vain to obtain a copy of a book titled The Winds of Change: MacMilllan to Heath, 1975-95. My father-in-law is a keen historian and I imagined this volume as a perfect present. The author, John Ramsden, is an Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary and one of the most distinguished historians working in Britain. Ramsden published his incisive take on conservative politics in 1996. Unfortunately, it now is out of print and “temporarily out of stock”, even on Amazon
Book buying frustration feeds my growing fervour for copyright reform. The European Commission is holding a hearing next week to examine the impact in Europe of an agreement between American authors and publishers and Google to resuscitate millions of out of print, in-copyright books such as The Winds of Change. If all goes ahead as expected, American readers and researchers will be able to purchase digital copies of these titles – and their accumulated knowledge.
European readers and researchers will have less luck. The continent’s hodgepodge of backward-looking copyright rules designed to protect content creators are preventing an American-style breakthrough to bring the world’s lost books back to life. Europe needs a radical intellectual property update in order to accelerate the spread of knowledge – or it risks turning into a museum.
History teaches us how dangerous it is to lock away learning. Back in the Middle Ages, scholars created the Baghdad-based ‘House of Widsom,” or in Arabic, Bait al-Hikma. This library and translation institute represented a key element of the Islamic Golden Age. It translated books from Persian, Indian and Greek into Arabic, spreading wisdom to a wide audience and fueling great advances in mathematics astronomy, medicine, chemistry, zoology and geography. “Whoever wanted was at liberty to copy any book he wished to copy, or whoever required to read a certain book,” and admittance was permitted to everyone, “without distinction of rank,” writes James W. Thompson in his 1970 masterpiece Medieval Library (another classic by the way that is out of print and almost impossible to obtain or see without visiting a university research library).
By contrast, European data was stored away in closed off monasteries and did not foster easy knowledge transfer. As (former MP) Edward Gibbon writes in the The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Fast forward a little more than a millennium and we find ourselves living through the often disorienting but similarly exhilarating and revolutionary era for knowledge. My first job was as a trainee assistant in the Labour Party library. I spent hours toiling away in the dusty stacks searching for information to back up the party’s policy positions. I was also the guy that cut and pasted and copied the daily press cuttings for our great leaders. On a good day, Neil Kinnock was lucky to get his media monitoring by lunchtime. These days it’s emailed before breakfast. By the time I became a minister in 2008, anybody sitting at their desk could undertake the same research with a few, swift keyboard strikes. This exponential explosion and leveling of access to information represent one of the great wonders of our time, and my time as minister convinced me that our society would fall far behind unless we embraced the Internet, instead of fighting it.
Authors and other copyright holders need to be remunerated for their work. Instead of seeing the World Wide Web as a threat, however, these content creators should grasp a giant opportunity. The Net gives them the widest audience ever invented.
Remember the arrival of the first photocopier? Or the CD-Rom and DVD? When these innovations appeared, many feared they meant the demise of the publishing, music and movie industries. Instead, they ended up increasing sales for all these businesses. If leveraged properly, the Net will be a into a win-win experience for both rights holders and consumers – in all sorts of fields. Out of all the digital start-ups I met as a minister, the one that inspired me the most went by the catchy name Zopa. This “social” peer to peer network brings together lenders and borrowers. Zopa enjoys the capacity to completely re-write the terms of trade in the banking sector help inject trust back into a financial system that lacks this crucial commodity.
Musicians and artists enjoy similar opportunities. This week YouTube and the Performing Rights Society in the UK reached a deal to reward content creators for their work (though I suspect artists would like to see the value of the as yet, secret deal)
Books are no different. Forward-thinking publishers around the world ranging from the Oxford University Press and Bertelsmann (which owns Random House) support the American books agreement, which sets up a new non-profit registry which will be able for the first time to search, preview and buy online access to a great number of out-of-print books.
Europe cannot afford to be left behind. EU Commissioner Viviane Reding recently made an important speech calling for “a modern set of European rules that encourage the digitisation of books.” As she noted, “more than 90% of books in Europe’s national libraries are no longer commercially available, because they are either out of print or orphan works (which means that nobody can be identified to give permission to use the work digitally).” Her solution was “the creation of a Europe-wide public registry for such works could stimulate private investment in digitisation, while ensuring that authors get fair remuneration also in the digital world.” And she concluded: “Let us be very clear: if we do not reform our European copyright rules on orphan works and libraries swiftly, digitisation and the development of attractive content offers will not take place in Europe, but on the other side of the Atlantic.”
How right she is. And by the way, does anybody have a copy of Ramsden’s The Winds of Change: MacMilllan to Heath, 1975-95? My father-in-law still is waiting to receive his perfect gift.
7 comments ↓
I would be interested in your take on the opposition to the Google book deal, for example Bill Thompson’s piece on the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8233324.stm
I agree that the fast and widespread access to information is a public good, constrained only by the need for incentives to develop and publish information in the first place. With e-books and print on demand technology there is no technical reason why any book should ever go out of print. It is unlikely that any new works will do so since they will be created in digital form from the begining.
There is also a great advantage for society as a whole that historic works now out of copyright are digitised and made available. My only concern is that there should be a mechanism for remunerating the libraries that hold the originals so that they have a funding stream to cover the costs of holding and preserving the originals for posterity. This should be paid by the digitising company and recouped either by a small charge for using the digitised images or advertising.
The difficult area is those books still in copyright but not available in digitised format. There needs to be a carrot and stick approach. Copyright holders should have the right to a return for their work. They obviously have the option to license their material to digitising companies in return for approriate royalties, and it should remain their right to do so. The issue is that if they chose not to make material available in that form, and if the original print format is not longer available, does society have a right to impose a compulsory license agreement upon them. Under such agreement a digitising company will have the right to reproduce the material in return for either an up front fee or a royalty payment for usage within the remaining copyright period.
To allow copyright material to be copied and published without payment to the author is unfair and may deter the publication of new creative or carefully researched materials. To allow interesting and valuable material to go out of circulation until it is out of copyright deprives society of a potentially valuable resource.
There must be a sensible compromise deal that can be developed. However until it is sorted out the Google land grab needs to be resisted.
I advocate the digitization of old catalog books the same way I advocate all old music to be offered and sold digitally.
The great thing about the Internet is that once an old book or track goes online it’s up forever and inventory is infinite.
The Internet is the ultimate copy-paste machine but it also serves well to collectors.
I agree with you in principle, but the devil is in the details. Google’s approach will effectively give it a de-facto monopoly on scanned books. (The Register has been following this story for some time.)
The Google Books agreement could very easily result in the Google scans becoming the _only_ copies of many books, and while Google like to pretend they’re good at this, the fact remains that the Optical Character Recognition technology and transcription processes they’re using are less than perfect.
If the EU is going to try something along these lines, I feel the Google-centric process of converting the many older books into electronic form should be avoided. Perhaps a better solution is to reform the public lending library system so that they perform the archival process instead, effectively creating a National Arts Archive.
This would effectively mean the end of libraries as we know them, but be more relevant to today’s society in an age when pretty much any book anybody wants to read can be bought online for less than the price of the bus ticket to the nearest (probably closed) library!
In any case, the status quo is untenable.
I’d also suggest a root-and-branch reform of *all* IP-related law. The argument in favour of new high speed railways—that it’s cheaper to build an entirely new railway than to try upgrading an old one—applies to most complex systems, not just transport. The UK’s legal system is a terrifying mess and so top-heavy that the argument that “ignorance is no excuse” no longer holds any water: our system of laws is now so complicated that even our own *police* have trouble keeping track of what’s what.
Whoever wins the next General Election needs to bite the bullet and admit that it’s time for a reboot.
Tom, if you really honestly want a copy of Ramsden’s “The Winds of Change”, then you can try the British Library’s Document Supply Centre where the book has shelfmark 96/19089 DSC. They can supply you with a copy of the whole book, in certain circumstances. It tends to be expensive.
Looks like as one might expect The Winds of Change Macmillan – Heath is 1957 – 75, not as set out. There is a second volume relating to later dates.
You might try ringing some bookshops, not all specialists are online.
Agree that it is about time digitisation was much more widespread, willing to join a campaign.
Pls keep folk posted.
E Books
What about when you go to reread a book and the system says buy it again? Or worse says buy new software from Mr. Gates
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