GooglePrint: Bad Press
Pat Schroeder and Bob Barr put out an op-ed in today's Washington Times that is just amazing.
Surely it is animosity towards Google that is driving the authors' copyright analysis. (Google should make sure its Washington office has the resources it needs to both march up on the Hill to explain things to people and contribute richly to campaigns.)
Google is NOT scanning copyrighted books and putting them up on their web site. That's not what's going on. (My earlier post explained this.) Google is making three sets of sentences from particular books available in response to search queries. Google is making very clear what its plans are.
Schroeder and Barr claim that “If publishers and authors have to spend all their time policing Google for works they have already written, it is hard to create more.” A more tenuous, incredible utilitarian argument would be hard to imagine. I'm confident that Google's program will have less than zero effect on authors' incentives to create.
All computers do is make copies. It cannot be that the step of making a nonpublic copy as a necessary element of providing (clearly transformative) search results is illegal. I “copy” pages into my mind in order to remember them and talk about them later. Is that infringement? I make money from talking about them later. Is that commercial destruction of someone else's market?
The crux of Schroeder's and Barr's point must be this statement:
Google envisions a world in which all content is free; and of course, it controls the portal through which Internet user's [sic] access that content. It would completely devalue everyone else's property and massively increase the value of its own.
This is really about fear and hatred of Google, not principled arguments about copyright law. That's odd, because Google doesn't control access to “content” – network providers do. If another search company came up with a better algorithm and a more appealing interface, we'd go there. (Sorry, Google.)