Ethanol Demagogue wrote:

Enter Google, the hip, incredibly profitable corporation whose motto is "Do No Evil." Google doesn't like the copyright laws as they have existed for centuries. Google wants the rights to store all the books in the world in its Google Library program, and the company doesn't want to pay for that right.

Copyright? No problem. Google cites "fair use," but it isn't using 400 words; it plans to digitize whole libraries and make them available piece by piece. Google is formidable. Google has brilliant public relations people and clever lawyers and connections in important places.

I'm not getting the controversy here, hasn't Amazon been doing this for awhile now?

Amazon doesn't make the entire book available for you to read, for free, online.

I agree that copyright laws in the country are ridicules but this the wrong way to fight it. First Google should partner with the Project Gutenberg and index all their books. These are already in the public domain. Second, Google should lobby for expanding "fair-use" of works not in the public domain, perhaps for non-commerical or academic work. Google books could have a disclaimer about appropriate usage. Perhaps it should be rate limited to 25 books a day unless you register a .edu email address or something.

I support what Google is trying to do but Google will lose its "No Do Evil" status if blatantly violates statues even if those statues are stupid.

Acidus wrote:

Amazon doesn't make the entire book available for you to read, for free, online.

You tend to be pretty on top of your shit, so I must assume that I've missed something. Last I read, Google was storing whole books, but the system was designed to display only segments relevant to a particular search you run. That's a far cry from making the book available to read in it's entirety. So, then, where is it that you found this information?

Or are you making the leap that some clever folks will find a way, through repeated searches and software to stitch results together, to reproduce the text? Or is it that someone could break into the servers and steal them at which point they're in the wild and impossible to contain?

Don't get me wrong, I think Google's vision of it's Print service has some serious problems, and I don't seek to ignore the concerns of authors and publishers, but based on the knowledge I have, equating this service to a text free-for-all is inaccurate.

k wrote:

Acidus wrote:

Amazon doesn't make the entire book available for you to read, for free, online.

You tend to be pretty on top of your shit, so I must assume that I've missed something. Last I read, Google was storing whole books, but the system was designed to display only segments relevant to a particular search you run. That's a far cry from making the book available to read in it's entirety. So, then, where is it that you found this information?

Or are you making the leap that some clever folks will find a way, through repeated searches and software to stitch results together, to reproduce the text? Or is it that someone could break into the servers and steal them at which point they're in the wild and impossible to contain?

Don't get me wrong, I think Google's vision of it's Print service has some serious problems, and I don't seek to ignore the concerns of authors and publishers, but based on the knowledge I have, equating this service to a text free-for-all is inaccurate.

That was my impression, that they would take the amazon model of storing the whole thing, only showing the fair use 400 words or what have you.