Using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Backwards

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed to help publishers of music and print media have a way to protect themselves against the onslaught of piracy on the Internet. (The industry is alarmist about this problem, to say the least.) The DMCA requires that Internet Service Providers and websites take down allegedly infringing material when they receive a complaint from the putative copyright holder. The alleged infringer can issue a counter complaint, but the immediate response of the ISP or the website must be take down first, consider counter complaint second.

Remember: The purpose of this was to prevent works from escaping into cyberspace. Publishers want to restrict access to "their" materials.

I just used the DMCA backwards. I want my work -- my first book, Food Fights: International Regimes and the Politics of Agricultural Trade Disputes -- to be more widely available. I'm not sure whether I want to charge potential purchasers a couple of bucks for a digital copy or just give it away for free, but I do know that I want to use the Web to get more readers. Right now, it's in a grand total of 185 libraries worldwide, and 7 copies are available from Amazon partners. A sorry fate! And, darn it, it was a good book. Constructivist before constructivism. But I digress.

Way back in 1993, my book was published by Gordon and Breach, which no longer exists. G&B was bought by Taylor and Francis. Over the years I have tried to contact T&F. No response. By now the contract has expired, and the copyright has reverted to me. When I saw earlier this year that Google Books had a preview of my book with a link to T&F, I realized that T&F was infringing on my copyright. To add insult to injury, when you click on the link to T&F, the T&F website tells you that this book is no longer available.

I sent T&F an email saying that they no longer held copyright on my book and that they had no right to post my book on Google Books. No response.

From my perspective, T&F is actively preventing access to my copyrighted material. Since Taylor & Francis control the Google Books website with my book on it, I cannot take control of my book on Google Books. Worse, T&F only allows a preview and is not making the book available in digital format. I want to take advantage of low cost (or free!) distribution of e-copies via the web to get my book out there.

So I filed a DMCA complaint with Google Books. Now I'll wait and see what happens. If Google Books takes that page away from T&F (as it should), then I should be able to submit the book myself.

And of course I'm snickering, because my second book (copyright still in the great care of a much better publisher, the superlative Lynne Rienner) is on intellectual property.