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.)
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Your post is just rubbish.
BTW, Google Inc. IS scanning copyrighted books without explicit permission from their author or publisher. But since you are completely blind by the Google affective marketing you think that everything it does is good. Pitiful.
Is this mass copying of a single file for mass distribution? Even if but a few sentences being displayed per query (each being a different user response from the single file copy), I think this is a reasonable question to the model. It appears the digitized copy is sitting (exclusively) on Google servers. I think this has relevance. In effect, Google has acquired the copies, acting as a content aggregator for what is intended by design to be widespread distribution of each single file copy. I think it is reasonable to say that libraries own the rights to make a single copy (they bought the work and paid the royalty). But not sure if this right covers the inherent design of widespread distribution as a result of making a single copy. The technology enables a single copy to be accessed by what can be an infinite number of queries simultaneously. Where are the permissions emulating from for this? Don't know the answer, just asking the question