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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."
You're right. This isn't about fair prices for consumers, it's about control. Why should I have to pay just to read a paper which was funded with my tax dollars?
They probably think that people will use Google to "steal" what should be in the public domain to begin with. They think that it will ruin their business, just like how the internet "ruined" the newspaper business.
I don't think so. I mean, most libraries exist to provide free or low cost access to as much of this information as they can.
I wonder if the library association is interested in this because they worry about their own existence?
Personally, I don't think this is a terrible idea. I mean, many of us don't doubt Google's intentions... But I like this sort of mindset when someone has a de facto monopoly. I'd rather err on the side of suspicion and actually put emphasis protecting competitors.
Maybe Google should take their ball and go home. They *are not* required to digitize millions of book for they general perusal of mankind, if they don't want to. Let these selfish "library groups" wallow in the absence of Google Books.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Well said. The public pays the taxes that support all of the government necessary to enable Copyright. The public, therefore, rightfully owns those works after a limited time. By extending Copyright, they effectively robbed all of us of our rightful property. What hypocrisy for them to crack down on "piracy".
But in this case they will have a monopoly simply because no one else has bothered to do what they're planning to do. Why should they be punished for being the only ones who want to digitize everything? I read constantly about how horrible it will be that Google will be the only ones doing this, but if people actually thought competition would help, there would already be a competitor.
I agree, by the logic everyone is using, no one should do anything new because they would have a monopoly until someone copied them. The whole point is that Google is trying something no one else has bothered to do, and anyone who wants to put the money and effort can duplicate. The problem is having to drag the old school kicking and screaming into the new millennium.
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.