Comments on: Google tries its book project at Princeton

By: Heidi

Heidi — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 14:31:25 +0000

Paper based media do differ–they’re paper-based. That was the medium the publisher decided to have them printed in. If they’d decided to have them digital, that would be a different story. But because it’s a different medium, transferring them to the internet makes the new material a derivative work. The right to make derivative works resides with the copyright holder.
Codes have been cracked, maybe not Google’s, but it certainly wouldn’t take long–the simple fact that their employees would have access to it, with their ever increasing business, is scary.
The right to opt out, as we’ve seen with YouTube is really not working. It’s a total farse. As soon as material is taken down, it’s put back up again. Come on. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the internet is not a safe haven for copyrighted material.
I’m not opposed to having public domain material up. But the whole idea that the world has “the right” to all knowledge printed in books for free is misguided. People put a lot of work into books they publish and deserve the copyrights they hold, not just the money. That’s another misguided idea. They have the right to decide how their material is used. Let them keep it and make those decisions themselves.

By: GH

GH — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 12:03:57 +0000

Few books sell many copies and most books never have a substantial amount of readers.

Digitizing and indexing books allows access to works that otherwise few people would ever find.

As Tim O’Reilly stated:
“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html

By: joelpt

joelpt — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 21:19:22 +0000

Just because some books exist in Google’s database doesn’t mean “it’s out there, [and] people will get ahold of it”. Someone would have to crack Google’s security systems to do that — and to my knowledge, Google hasn’t yet been cracked in this way.

If fair-use doesn’t stand for paper-based works, what do you say about search engines indexing web content? It’s exactly analogous: Google indexes your copyrighted website (book) without your explicit permission; they display snippets of your copyrighted work; they link users to your original source material; and they give copyright holders a means to ‘opt-out’ entirely.

I see no reason to think paper-based works differ from digitally-based works in this respect. The only real difference is that websites have historically always been indexed by search providers, whereas paper-based publishers have historically had physical control over their properties.

In other words, the only “difference” is that the expectations of paper-based publishers differ from those of web-based publishers — yet the law does not dictate outcomes based on what someone may expect the law to dictate. What is true for one party is true for all parties.

By: Heidi

Heidi — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:14:30 +0000

Glad to see another who’s against this farce. This is definitely not fair use. If the publishers want to go digital, they have the right to decide whom they allow to digitize/scan, etc–make that derivative work. Google can’t take it upon itself to assume they have that right under any stretch of the fair use ideology. Even if they only let others see snippets, the fact remains they ‘ve got the whole thing there for themselves, and once it’s out there, people will get ahold of it. Long experience with everything else digital has poven that.