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Re: Your Lawsuit is Not Helping Me or My Book

There appears to be some confusion about the salient points of the current
dispute over Google Print for Libraries. The question is not, Who
benefits? The question is, Who owns it? Google would have almost
universal cooperation from publishers if (a) the program were opt-in
instead of opt-out (which speaks to the question of Who owns it?) and (b)
libraries were not being given copies of the scanned files. If authors
believe publishers are foolish not to cooperate with Google, they will
find other publishers.

Ten years from now, assuming that Google wins this fight, all the
advocates of the Google Library program will look back and wonder how it
is they stood by as the property of thousands of authors and publishers
was appropriated for the economic benefit of the Google shareholders. We
have not seen the like in my lifetime.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message ----- From: "David P. Dillard" <jwne@temple.edu>
To: "LIBLICENCE DISCUSSION GROUP" <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 3:20 PM
Subject: Re: Your Lawsuit is Not Helping Me or My Book

Reading this post is most heartening to me.  I have been shocked by the
reactions of some in the publishing industry and by some authors by the
lack of realization of the benefits which outweigh hugely any "harm"
that may come by full text indexing of books are bringing in that
people, through Google Print searches and searches in competitive book
content indexing projects from Google Print competitors, will serve to
cause people to need books they would never have realized contain
important information about topics which they are researching or
learning about without these searches.  While some will use libraries to
view this content, others will purchase the books to find additional
content or to have the information handy as needed over the long haul
for their research project by owning their own copy of the book.  Gary
Price in a recent excellent post to the DIG_REF list noted that Google
Print is not the only provider of this service.