Reining in Google

CDPatten writes "The Washington Times has an op-ed piece by two writers typically on opposing sides of the isle, Pat Schroeder and Bob Barr. The article is brief, but overwhelmingly opposes the Google Print service. From the article 'Not only is Google trying to rewrite copyright law, it is also crushing creativity ...Google envisions a world in which all content is free; and of course, it controls the portal through which Internet user's access that content. It would completely devalue everyone else's property and massively increase the value of its own.'. It sounds to me like they might be slightly peeved that Google is resuming the scanning.

Comments

To the rag that is the Wash. Times: Let them scan!

[MarkEst1973]

1. The Washington Times != The Washington Post. One is a bastion of DC journalism. The other is only slightly better than a tabloid.

2. Let Google scan. Let me search. Only by having Google's (or someone's) index available will I be able to easily find a book I never knew existed. The Dewey Decimal System's got nothing on full text indexing.

Gentlemen, Start Your Hypocrisy Detectors....

[Steve B]

And so we find ourselves joining together to fight a $90 billion company bent on unilaterally changing copyright law to their benefit

Who wants to start posting Barr and Schroeder's voting records?

Or does their objection to doing it "unilaterally" merely mean "our old colleages aren't getting their cut"?

Fair Use Misleading.

[Kefaa]

I do believe in Copyrights (that alone may get this modded down to -255). However, if google lives up to the claim they will only provide snippets, how is that different than what any web site, quoting an author does. Is this web site in violation Dilbert -why you are wrong by quoting from Dilbert? It appears fair use to me.

Where google may have issues, is if anyone figures out a way to reconstruct a book in total. They would give people like this a lot of ammunition against them. Of course, the library does not prevent me from scanning a book if I take it home, but that is something that will be missed in the hype around it. I am not sure how they could prevent this, but these are some pretty smart guys.

In this case, the authors sound more like they want a cut of the click through, regardless of sales. What may be interesting in the end is book sellers would be the most likely to advertise on Google Print. A "click here to buy this book" type of link.

Re:Google free ride is coming to an end

[WindBourne]

Why should Google be allowed to use content of any kind - be it websites or books - for free? For the benefit of mankind - yeah, right. If they want to benefit mankind they should change their website to Google.org, stop selling advertising on other people's copyrighted content and open up their databases to anyone without restriction.

they index the content of websites/books and provide it for a cost; a side advertisement that is related. They are not claiming to do it for mankind, even though it is a clear benefit.

Within a few years (if it has not happened already) Google's advertising revenue will dwarf all domestic newspaper ad revenues.

And your point is?????? News media over the last 5 years have become lapdogs and no longer do their jobs (report esp on politicians). So instead, BLOGGERS have really been replacing newspaper as a major source of info, not google. Google is actually helping newspaper via news.google.com.

Is this unchecked growth a good thing?

And why is it not? If you can do it better, than do so. Google shows innovative capitalism at its best. They not only have done innovative work, but have continued to do so. They do not have a monopoly, but even they do, it is natural (as opposed to MS's which was/is an illegally aquired and maintained).