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more on legal points djf An author's dissent on Google Print
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 19:03:49 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Brad Templeton <btm () templetons com> Date: October 30, 2005 6:51:59 PM EST To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Cc: Ip Ip <ip () v2 listbox com>Subject: Re: [IP] more on legal points djf An author's dissent on Google Print
The real interesting lesson of the Google Print/Libraries story isan examination of how our copyright laws change. A strict interpretation
of copyright law as originally written and interpreted held it to prohibit just about all copies, with a limited number of fair use exceptions. Those exceptions have grown, case by case (and more rarely, by statutory change) largely when bold parties (including older search engines, Diamond Rio, MP3.com, ReplayTV, Google, Grokster, and most famously the Sony Betamax) have stretched the bounds. Some have lost, many have won, some have come down in the middle. By traditional interpretations, the search engines and the internet archive are brashly illegal under copyright law. Some have argued even routers that transmit data by copying packets could be illegal. Some have aruged USENET's store and forward to be illegal. As we know the studios argued taping a movie to watch it later was illegal and that moving a song from your CD to your MP4 player was illegal. This case will alter the flux, and the fact that some interpretations find it unlawful should not make us predict with any certainty that what google is doing is a violation of copyright. Not with any certainty at all. You also must break it into two parts. Part 1 is scanning the books, which is indeed copying them. Should the libraries and other owners be able to scan their books to make better use of them? Most think so.The second part, once you have saved a copy of a copyrighted work, whether
you can then index it and offer search to the public, providing snippetsthat match search results -- well, that's exactly what search engines have done since Lycos. And few would fight to make that illegal today, though
some do. Can we say that it's OK for a library to scan books it owns, and OK tobuild and serve an index of other people's content you copied legitimately
but not to combine the two? That will be part of what the courts will look at. As I noted earlier, the real battle is over the default, since Google is offering an opt-out procedure though they could make it even easier. (And no doubt they'll offer an after-the-fact opt-out.)The way this would get really interesting would be if a competing service
were to also index books, and pay the copyright holders a portion ofrevenue from the searches (as some authors seek here) and presumably insist
that they opt-out of any non-paying index like google. In the event of such, the authors might get more attention to a claim of harm. A voluntary collective licence might make sense here. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- more on legal points djf An author's dissent on Google Print David Farber (Oct 30)
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