Re: Google's Card Catalog Should Be Left Open

[Philip Cadigan <phil.cadigan@pbtype.com>]

It's an interesting point that search engines work like card catalogs.  
But in Google's case, the card catalog analogy seems facile to me.

Google scans the materials and stores them as TIFFs.  
<http://www.lib.umich.edu/staff/google/public/faq.pdf>

If Google really wanted to create an index they could do it without the
stored images.  They're already providing OCR with the text.  But I don't
think they would want to do that--they're putting an enormous amount of
money into this.  By marrying it to the larger "Print"  project, I think
they have other plans in place (again from the UM pdf)

> Q. 27: Will the Library put the digitized materials online also? 
> A: Yes, we are planning for that eventuality.
In other areas of Google Print they've been pretty upfront about not just
using indices, but giving people the whole page.  If UM gets their
collection online, and from there people will start to say 'we already own
that same book, why can't we have access to Google's digital version'.  
If that logic is legally OK, it's an upload of the library's ISBNs and
every library has their own digital copy of the book.

Personally, I think that the Google digitization project will be great.  
My hesitation is that I wonder how would people feel about the project if
some greedy publisher was behind it.  And if they felt differently, then
what's the reasoning that we should make special allowances for Google?

Phil

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Philip Cadigan
PbType LLC
http://pbtype.com

Vox: 617-314-6508
Fax: 617-314-6586

> Calling google's digitization effort a card catalog is putting the
> emphasis on the technical fact that a search engine doesn't ever search
> the full text, it actually searches an index that has been built from
> the full text. The interesting legal question at issue is whether the
> law considers robots reading books to create indexes to be substantively
> different from allowing humans to read books to create indexes without
> infringing the copyrights of authors. There are arguments both ways. The
> argument that they are different is framed in terms of calling the
> digital instantiation of the book a "copy", while the argument that they
> are the same is framed in terms of the process of creating the index.
>
> Personally, I think authors, libraries and publishers will all benefit
> from a legal environment where indexing is uninhibited and copying is
> strictly proscribed (where copying is defined in terms of producing
> functional equivalents of works- if a person can't read it, it's not a
> copy).
>
> Eric