It's a question of copyright, see

[Thorin]

Google Print sounds like a decent project, and it sounds like they are trying to treat the authors as fairly as possible.  Still, some authors want Google Print to cease and desist.



I'm rather ambivalent about this...  Yes, providing books online is a good idea, but the authors do have the clearly-established right to refuse to give permission to Google to reproduce their printed work.  If it weren't for the fact that Google is doing this to make money, I might be on their side.

[Lazybones]

Google is only indexing the full content and then providing back quotes in context, just like it does with websites..



Google is probably returning less content from the book than your average book review.



The way it is setup I can see NO WAY this would reduce sales of books that ARE indexed, in fact I bet it will be worse NOT to be indexed by this service..



The only way I can think this would hurt a book is if the cover promised one thing but a search of the book returned no results of what you where looking for in the content.



Only possible BIG problem I see is someone finding a way to retrieve a complete book from the system with clever hacking of the API.

[Shayne]

By indexing the book they are making a digital copy.  No different then downloading an MP3, clearly copyright infringment.

[Darren Dirt]

By indexing the book they are making a digital copy.  No different then downloading an MP3, clearly copyright infringment.

and since they have the full content stored somewhere, exploits can be and have been developed that allow someone to view the entire book front to back :O

[Mr. Analog]

Information wants to be free, if people really want it bad enough all it takes is someone to use a book scanner and post the PDF on IRC. At least Google would give the author / publisher some exposure and might bring them new potential customers.



Thousands of books are released a year, yet most people don't read anything beyond the top 100 lists. It is very likely that there is anawesome book out there that you haven't read about and will otherwise miss.



Incedentally, I am in favour of the authors making money, but the retail price of books is, to me, vastly bloated. The publishing industry is outmoded and must become more agile. It's gotta grow or it's gotta go!

[Shayne]

Incedentally, I am in favour of the authors making money, but the retail price of books is, to me, vastly bloated.

This is exactly what ive been saying for years.  The cost of media hasnt decreased as technology increases (like most things) instead its actually increased.  Books, Movies, Games, News Papers, Magazines, etc have all increased in price dramatically even as distribution or manufacturing has lowered their overall costs (granted perhaps piracy might have a small hand in that).



A game that costs $10,000,000 to produce, sells 1,000,000 copies at $59.99.  Some where in there the math just doesnt add up right.

[Thorin]

By indexing the book they are making a digital copy.  No different then downloading an MP3, clearly copyright infringment.

Yes, and in that sense it's pretty clear that Google Print will lose the legal battle.

all it takes is someone to use a book scanner and post the PDF on IRC

True.  Doesn't mean it's not copyright infringement, though.



Google Print could have avoided this controversy by first asking the authors of the works to be scanned in whether they give permission.  In the same letter that they ask for permission they could outline the business case that shows the author would most likely gain from this exposure.



The interesting thing here is that some authors specifically do not want their published works scanned and available as excerpts on the 'net.  As much as they would probably make money from it, those authors have the right, as we all do with our copyrighted material, to simply refuse that it be made available in any format other than what they supplied it in.



I know I would gladly let my books be scanned by as seemingly-innocent and upright company as Google, but there are those (I think crazy) authors who don't and that's their right.

[Darren Dirt]

Brief commentary on Wired...

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,68939,00.html?tw=wn_story_related

[Thorin]

Brief commentary on Wired...

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,68939,00.html?tw=wn_story_related

Interesting, thanks for finding that.  One of the comments at the bottom mentioned Amazon's "Look inside the Book" feature.  I wonder how that differs from Google Print.  I would guess that Amazon simply asked the copyright holders for permission first, sidestepping all the lawyers...

[Shayne]

Interesting, thanks for finding that.  One of the comments at the bottom mentioned Amazon's "Look inside the Book" feature.  I wonder how that differs from Google Print.  I would guess that Amazon simply asked the copyright holders for permission first, sidestepping all the lawyers...

Thats one beautiful catch 22.  My guess is that an author looks at it like this, "If your at a store shopping for a book, and you open my book to see if its what you want you might buy it.  However if your doing a research term paper and stumble upon chunks of my book online, you'll just use those".



I dunno really.  Google is clearing violating copyright.  Are they violating copyright by putting my website itself in its listing?

[Fedora Gal]

Are they violating copyright by putting my website itself in its listing?

No, and why...because by putting up your website you are already publishing it to the web and therefore making the information contained in it public. If google were to copy the entire site and paste it on their own server and advertise that, then I guess that would be a copyright infringement. But by adding it to their listing they are just making information you have already made public more accessable.

[Shayne]

No, and why...because by putting up your website you are already publishing it to the web and therefore making the information contained in it public.

Uh, i dont think so.  I create a personal website to share pictures with friends and family.  Some jackass links to my website from his, next thing you know Google crawls my website.  Was never intended to be public, and was made public.



Guess you could technically password lock it.  I dont think the excuse of it "being on the internet makes it public domain" really works.

[Thorin]

You are going down the slippery slope where at the end, if someone views your site they are technically downloading the entire thing to their machine and thus making a copy and thus violating copyright...



There have been successful court cases in other countries where websites with nothing but links were found guilty of violating copyright (big one in Australia).  Generally, though, people don't challenge the search engines' use of links to websites under copyright law because it is highly beneficial to most of them.



Note that Google does cache websites on their servers for quicker retrieval, and that they also provide a mechanism for authors and companies to request that sites or certain portions of sites never be cached.  A clear case of copyright infringement that no one complains about because they made sure to provide an easy work-around, even though the onus is still on the copyright holder...

[Darren Dirt]

something sorta related - this article is like a rant against the evils of "robots.txt", but he touches on a similar issue:



http://bitworking.org/news/No_Fishing

[Shayne]

Nice link Darren.



Brings me to an interesting story.  When i was running The Mars Project we never had a favico or robots.  When i did my log parsing it would come up with millions (no @%&#) of lines of errors due to browsers requesting it and it not being there.



Though..he is being a little babyish about it