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The Point of Google Print
vinohradska writes "Eric Schmidt has written a good article called the The point of Google Print. It clearly lays out the argument against the current lawsuit: 'Even those critics who understand that copyright law is not absolute argue that making a full copy of a given work, even just to index it, can never constitute fair use. If this were so, you wouldn't be able to record a TV show to watch it later or use a search engine that indexes billions of Web pages.'"
I don't see the business case against opposing google print. Could the net effect be anything else but higher sales due to the amount of people who will find just the right book when searching through google?
The business case is simple:
"It's my football."
I've talked to a publisher about something similar, and his attitude was "I don't care if it will make me more money - if I want it indexed, I will do it myself, so I can charge for it. I don't want anyone but me making money by providing a service for my products, even if it's a service I can't or won't provide myself."
They don't care about more money, all they care about is control.
Google print, Amazon book search, this lawsuit and others are just small steps in the evolution of copyright into something else. I don't think we can anticipate what that will be, any more than our ancestors anticipated a day when making and distributing copies of information would be as easy as talking. In the time it's taken me to type this message I could have sent the lifetime works of Benjamin Franklin to someone on the other side of the world. Not just his published writings, but every single word he ever wrote down. It's ludicrous to think that our ancestors would have formulated copyright in the same way if they had known what we know, or that copyright shouldn't evolve like everything else.
At first, I thought, "Huh? Why would the publishers be renumbered at all?". Then I realized you meant to say "THE PUBLISHERS RECEIVE ZERO REMUNERATION".
Then I thought, "Huh? they didn't receive any money under the old way either -- when I visited the library to find my quotes."
First get your facts straight. Then you can distort them as you please. -- Mark Twain
Here's a fairly funny satire about Google Print:
http://www.vortex.com/reality/2005-10-23
It argues that you can copy anything you want-- as long as you promise to index it and put the index on the web. Then you can keep the text around and do what you will. If anyone gives you a hard time, come up with some inane opt-out policy with a real nasty bureaucracy and blame them for being uncool.
I hate to say it, but this satire convinced me that Google is pretty sleezy. The creators are getting nothing and a bunch of guys who happen to build a few automated indexers are multibillionaires. I'm happy to reward innovation, but this is nutty.
Tim O'Reilly made an excellent point in support of Google Print when he
pointed out that the biggest threat to authors is not piracy, but obscurity.