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Second Google Suit Over Print Library Project
linumax writes "The Association of American Publishers, an organization of book publishers including Pearson Plc's Penguin unit and McGraw-Hill sued Google over its plan to create a digital Web library of printed books. The Association of American Publishers sued Wednesday after talks broke down with Google over copyright issues raised by the Google Print Library Project. Publishers say Google will infringe copyrights unless it gets advance permission for the scanning. The suit is the second by the publishing industry against Google's library plans and underscores the worries sparked by Google's expansion beyond Web search." From the article: "Google, which is working with five of the world's great libraries (Stanford, Harvard and Michigan university libraries, the New York Public Library and the Bodleian library in Oxford) to digitise their collections, stopped scanning copyrighted books in August after protests from publishers. However, it intends to resume its work next month."
We are mere months (maybe a year) away from the ability to completely scan any book and convert it accurately to text based PDF in under an hour. It will likely be F/OSS software that does it, released ostensibly to save old books in the public domain.
When this happens, books will end up on P2P just like movies, music, porn, and images. Just as P2P helps people find interesting musicians and performers, it will help people find interesting writers and authors.
No one can stop it. The big delay was caused by lack of available hardware to handle the intensive scanning and converting. We've seen software that can use a webcam or cellcam to scan documents quickly. This is processor performance driven. PCs aren't getting slower.
5 huge libraries and a multibillion dollar corporation can not compete with hundreds of millions of end users volunteering a few hours a year to copy their favorite books. The entire published collection of books for the last hundred years could be online by 2007.
Google should be embraced by publishers, not sued. Google could track interest, topically sort similar novel(list)s, and provide a great research tool and froogle-to-buy source.
If the RIAA had iTunes before Napster, who knows where we'd be. If the MPAA embraced e-distribution at a reasonable price and quality, the same is true.
People don't become pirates for financial reasons of theft, but of supply and demand. Hundreds of millions of BT users would rather pay $1 than waste hundreds of hours on low quality, low speed, high risk piracy.