From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 22:14:40 +0800

To recap, I found my iPad Google Play app in need of updating and let
it proceed; but because I was in Singapore at the time, it had the
effect of undownloading all the books I had loaded on my device.  When
I tried to download again, I was told that Google Play does not work
in "your country" and so was unable to proceed.  E-mail contact with
Google was unhelpful.

My liblicense-l post telling the story got picked up by Boing Boing,
which gave it a moment of fame, then got picked up and treated
skeptically by The Digital Reader.  Meanwhile, I learned more facts:

1.  Though the error message had clearly said Google Play did not work
here in Singapore, a few titles proved to be downloadable (though the
updated app was painfully, egregiously slow at doing so).  The second
volume of a three-volume set of Middlemarch was available, but not the
other two, for example.  I did not discern a pattern.

2. John Wilkin's posting here alerted me that there is a prevailing
interpretation of copyright law in the eyes of Google and Hathi Trust
that strikes me as more restrictive than any other I have heard,
leading to regularly treating works 120-140 years old as if still in
copyright.  That would explain some of what I see, but there are
inconsistencies.  The three volumes of Middlemarch were published in
1872 and 1873.  The 1873 volume is not downloadable, but of the two
1872 volumes, one is, one isn't.  Numerous other volumes are quite
clearly out of copyright, because I know when George Eliot and Herman
Melville and William James died -- found out by Googling them, as it
happens.  Moby-Dick I can download, Varieties of Religious Experience
not.  Does Google know Melville but not James?

3.  So Google spent a gazillion dollars digitizing books, but now does
not wish to spend the money to put adequate metadata around them.
That Middlemarch took me a good while to get in the first place,
because it's very hard to be sure you've found a consistent set of
volumes, 1, 2, and 3 of anything, so very poor are the metadata and
the display of same.  My Google account is cluttered with Google Books
I acquired and then realized that I hadn't gotten what I wanted at all
because the metadata were so misleading.

4. So I would offer the hypothesis that the problem I had is a cross
between bizarre copyright policy, bad metadata, and software written
in a way that aggravates the problem.

5.  I was then distracted by the flurry of sites picking up the post
and various correspondence.  I must say that the "comments" on those
other sites were of unvaryingly low quality.  Today I even had a
two-hour flirtation with a Very Famous Media Outlet that thought they
wanted to interview me, then decided I wasn't interesting enough.

6.  So today I also got a followup message eight days later from
Google Play support, apologizing for not getting back to me and saying
that there was a "bug" with the way public domain works were handled
by Google Play and they were working to fix it.  Do the folks at
Google Play follow Boing Boing?

I draw two lessons from all this.

First, corporate organizations (for-profit, not-for-profit, makes no
difference) have a powerful urge to self-preservation, so strong that
it often runs counter to the professed institutional mission.  So when
it comes to copyright here, for example (but I can think of parallel
examples from my administrative career), the question Google asks
itself is not "are we in compliance with the law" but "are we
absolutely sure that nobody else will be able to claim we are not in
compliance with the law".  Asking that second question gets a very
different answer from the first and makes the world a much more
restrained and chilly place than it might otherwise be.

Second, MUCH of what we think we have "acquired" or "own" or even
"possess" in digital space is in fact material that we are merely
permitted to use for now, for the benefit and convenience of the
provider.  (It may, for now, be to the benefit of the provider to
please me; but that can change.)  That permission can be withdrawn
deliberately or inadvertently in a variety of ways.  One of my to-do
list items when I get home is go back to "My Library" on "Google Play"
and firmly download the books there that I want to keep to my own
desktop and back them up, while I still can.  I think that will work
and I will make a point of being less dependent on somebody else.

Jim O'Donnell