Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity

What are you thinking, Herb Mitgang?

The knee-jerk reaction some writers and other artists have to any unauthorized use of their copyrighted works often baffles me.  Artists often react viscerally to any unauthorized use of their creations even when doing so fails to serve, as far as I can tell, any legitimate personal interest they might have.  It’s as if they simply think: it’s my property, and no one can touch it unless I tell them they can!

The Association of American University Presses provides a useful summary of the Google Book Search Program:

Many university and scholarly presses have participated enthusiastically in the Publisher program, which allows their print publications to be indexed and displayed to an appropriate extent through Google’s beta online index of print materials while protecting their own, their authors’ and third parties’ rights. The Library program has proven controversial, as Google plans to scan, digitize, and copy not only public domain works from five world-class research libraries, but also the in-copyright collections of at least some of those libraries. The libraries are the Bodleian at Oxford University, Harvard University Library, the University of Michigan Library, the New York Public Library, and Stanford University Library.

It is important to understand that Google is not merely copying the libraries’ collections in order to make them available electronically to the world.  Instead, Google Book Search allows its users to search the entire database of what Google has thus far scanned.  For works by authors who have granted Google permission, a user of the Book Search can scan read the entire text.  But for those who have not expressly provided that permission, a search through Book Search will turn up only books containing the searched terms along with snippets of approximately 3 lines around the searched terms.

In short, Google Book Search is a boon to researchers, allowing them to locate books relevant to their research in libraries they could not possibly ever have visited.  They then can obtain the books, either through inter-library loans or through online purchases.  Without Google Book Search, in other words, myriads of profoundly useful books scattered around the world would remain utterly invisible to the vast majority of people with interest in them.

Which brings me to Herbert Mitgang.  Mitgang is one of the named plaintiffs in the Authors Guild lawsuit seeking to shut down the Google Library Project.  Mitgang was born in 1920, and since the 1950s he has been a prolific writer in numerous genres, from journalism to fiction to biography.  Among his books are three on Abraham Lincoln.

Mitgang, however, is hardly a household name.  His books on Lincoln are still in print, but, despite my acquaintaince with several amateur Lincoln-obsessed readers, none of them have read any of Mitgang’s Lincoln books.  Mitgang is 87 years old.  It seems quite likely therefore that, within a decade or so, the only feasible way Lincoln researchers will be able to obtain his books will be from the collections being scanned by the Google Library project.

In short, I cannot begin to imagine why Mitgang wants to shut down the Google Library Project.  Without it, his books will likely fade into oblivion.  On the other hand, if the Google Library Project is a success, there is every possibility that future Lincoln researchers might come across and use Mitgang’s Lincoln books.  I wish I could get in a room and ask him: Why are you doing this?  Do you really want your life’s work to disappear entirely from the sight of future researchers?

My sister, a lifelong writer, for years bristled at my views of copyright.  She’s come around.  The fact that the entire corpus of one genre she’s worked in for decades, the retelling of folk tales for children, is available online has, she’s realized, made her more visible, more attractive to publishers, students, and producers of other media.  Exposure is, it seems, the lifeblood of an artist; putting one’s work behind a fence, on the other hand, will only make it invisible.

I wonder what Herb Mitgang thinks of that?