check this article for a great summary on the Google print debacle. (by a great law prof Lawrence Lessig)
Google is faced with a huge lawsuit from both the Publishers and Authors of books - merely for "scanning" their books in order to index them for their search engine. The way that the copyright act in the US (and Cda) is set up is that making a "copy" of any work is infringement, subject to certain "defenses" (I prefer USER'S RIGHTS) such as fair use (like for research, education, something like what Google is doing, etc). The only reason the Author's and Publishers even have a cause of action is due to the architure of the Internet - it automatically makes a copy of a website, page etc. every time you look at it -- so in order for google to index them they have to scan the books digitally which makes a digital copy. Again I want to stress that if the book is copyright protected only the TOC, index and a couple sentences around your search term will be shown - if you like what you see then you either buy the book (and there are handy links pointing you in the right direction) or go to your library and get it. it is like the sweetest library catalogue ever! plus for books in the public domain you can see all the pages digitally. (go do some experimenting with shakespeare's works - Google Print)
Anyway it all comes back to the the Publishers and the Authors having a little sword (and I think that google has a huge SHIELD) and are willing to poke it anywhere to get a share of Google's advertising $. I think that Google has come up with yet another brilliant idea - good for them! they deserve their huge pie and all of it!
if they are worried about high litigation costs - I'll go work for them for free -- I just need to grad first and then article for a year and then get called to the bar -- I'll be ready to go next may! maybe I should write them a letter and tell them to buy some time! hahaha
Categories: ip
