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Library Groups Ask DOJ To Oversee Google Books
adeelarshad82 writes "Three library associations have asked the Justice Department to oversee Google's plans to create a massive digital library, so as to prevent excessively high pricing for institutional subscriptions. They said that there was unlikely to be an effective competitor to Google's massive project in the near term. They also asked for academic author representation on the Registry board. Google's plan to digitize millions of books has been criticized by a variety of sources and has recently been shut down in France."
This isn't about fair prices for consumers, it's about control. ... They probably think that people will use Google to "steal" what should be in the public domain to begin with.
I think you've got it exactly backwards. Here's the key line from TFA:
The library groups also express "great disappointment" that the DOJ did not not urge the parties to require representation of academic authors on the Registry board, even though academic authors wrote the vast majority of the books Google will include in its database, and those authors--unlike those in the Authors Guild---"probably would want the Registry to price the institutional subscription in a manner that maximizes public access rather than profits."
Get that? The library associations are the good guys here. Most librarians are very much in favor of public access (it kind of goes along with the whole concept of a library) and academic librarians in particular are really sick of seeing their limited budgets eaten up by absurd journal costs. What they're worried about, I think, is that Google will end up as a partner with the publishers in making it more expensive for people to get access to information which, as you correctly point out, they've already paid for with their taxes. Whether or not this concern is justified, I don't claim to know, but it's certainly worth raising the issue. And speaking as an academic, I can say that they're absolutely right about what academic authors in general would want. I'll never make a dime on any article I publish in a journal, and that's fine; the whole point of writing journal articles is to publicize the work.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
What Google gets out of this is the right to include all the content of most books ever written in their search results. That's a huge deal that would secure Google's position as the ultimate search engine. Google isn't doing this out of the kindness of their hearts.
What, you mean no one else has bothered to break the law? There's a reason why Google have the biggest scanned collection, and it's this: they got their collection illegally.
Surely you're not arguing that breaking the law is innovation? There's the reason why Google has no competitors on this.
Copyright doesn't allow *anybody* to scan all the books in a library and make them available online to the public willy nilly. Google got sued for it, and will continue to get sued for it and all the other copyright infractions they do on a daily basis, you can bet on that.
This is a social problem which has no proper solution other than reducing dramatically the copyright laws.