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Court Rules Book Scanning Is Fair Use, Suggesting Google Books Victory
concealment writes "A judge has ruled that the libraries who have provided Google with their books to scan are protected by copyright's fair use doctrine. While the decision doesn't guarantee that Google will win—that's still to be decided in a separate lawsuit—the reasoning of this week's decision bodes well for Google's case. Most of the books Google scans for its book program come from libraries. After Google scans each book, it provides a digital image and a text version of the book to the library that owns the original. The libraries then contribute the digital files to a repository called the Hathitrust Digital Library, which uses them for three purposes: preservation, a full-text search engine, and electronic access for disabled patrons who cannot read the print copies of the books."
What? By most accounts (by actual authors), being in the DB gets your books sold. Only the BS Authors Guild thinks this is a problem.
True, I suppose, but would it really have killed Google to just go out and buy a single copy of each book they scan? I think that would be more fair, and negligible in terms of cost to the almighty Google.
The interesting thing is that there's a massive, consistent and complete, collaborative digital archive of library print books and journals somewhere. If an Anon group wanted to do something really crazy, they'd pilfer that massive cache and release it unto the world.
That would be interesting..
True, I suppose, but would it really have killed Google to just go out and buy a single copy of each book they scan? I think that would be more fair, and negligible in terms of cost to the almighty Google.
These are old books that you can't get anywhere else. At what store do you believe Google can buy them, Barnes and Noble? Do you think they're getting them from libraries to be cheap?