Tim O'Reilly on the Google Library Project

dkleinsc writes "The New York Times is running an op-ed piece(free registration required) by Tim O'Reilly arguing that the Google Library Project is a good thing for authors in general, and suggests a lawsuit by the Author's Guild against Google is acting against authors' best interest."

Comments

Re:Author's Guild Stupidity

[capt.Hij]

You shouldn't assume from the name that organization is really about representing authors. In this case, though, they do not seem to be astroturf. If you check out their "talking points" they seem not to know the difference between scanning and publishing nor the difference between searching and publishing.

I disagree, it was in the authors interests

[NigelJohnstone]

They obviously want an 'opt-in' system, because that reduces the number of books competing to just the current commercial books, and removes possible public domain, orphan works and smaller publishers authors.

Joe public on the other hand, *is* best served by 'opt-out' because that includes orphaned work & possible public domain books.

So they want Google to index their books ,just not index everyone elses. That's what the lawsuit is about, getting an opt-in to reduce the number of competing works. All the 'copyright infringment / worried about security / worried about snippet size' claims are just bollocks that make no sense. Since Google has offered them an opt out, if they were truely worried, they could just flag their books as opt out and that would end it.

They lied, Google called them on their lie and now they will go to court and look real dumb. By giving them the opt-out Google has outmaneuvered them. So now they will lose, but if they could win it, it would have be in their interests.

They will say "we are worried about Google scanning our books", Google will say "but we are not going to scan your books, because as soon as we realised you didn't want that, we took you off the list", end of case.