Re: Question about Google Print

[adam hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

It may not be legal (or it may be) but what is do-able has changed,

Copying technology changes and the rules limiting or permitting what can
be copied 'without breach of copyright' will change. Publishers will want
this to be agreed and for fair limits to be set. But the limits will be a
long way beyond the flat No-No which currently appears on most copyright
pages.

This will happen with computer scannable/readable texts. In the 1950s and
60s lowcost xerography made photocopying doable and the rules evolved
(publishers were enormously helped by the way librarians patrolled and
self-limited this copying). Google are doing everybody a favour by showing
that copying can be done at low cost to deliver machine-readable and
searchable (and human readable/browseable) results. The genie is well out
of the bottle and Google are a responsible entity with whom publishers can
negotiate.

Publishers can thank their lucky stars it isnt a Napster problem. But just
suppose that Google gets stopped in its tracks and the next generation
mobile phone has a minute scanner and software which allows users/students
to build their own iPod-style libraries of texts. Children and students in
my street want to walk around with their collections of e-music. Why
shouldnt the next generation want to have similar personal anthologies of
text dangling from their neck? Book publishers will then be rightly
worried that all the bestsellers and good textbooks vanish through
BitTorrent or some Kazaa equivalent. Google isnt a Napster or a Kazaa and
publishers should welcome the Google Print initiative as a way of
regularising the almost unregularisable: copyright texts in a world where
every file is trivially copyable.

Google is incredibly much friendlier than any unregulated copying
technology.

Adam Hodgkin


On 6/14/05, Sally Morris (ALPSP) <sally.morris@alpsp.org> wrote:

> The copying is 100% - it's only the displaying to the Google user that
> is partial. 100% of all the books in a library's collection is, surely,
> nothing if not substantial
>
> Sally Morris, Chief Executive
> Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
> Email: sally.morris@alpsp.org
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rick Anderson" < rickand@unr.edu>
> To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
> Sent: Monday, June 13, 2005 10:32 PM
> Subject: RE: Question about Google Print

>> For in-copyright works (assuming they can figure out which these are),
>> the amount displayed will be extremely limited (a kind of 'keyhole'
>> view) though, of course, as far as legality is concerned that is
>> hardly the point.
>>
> > On the contrary, I think that "substantiality" of the copying is
> > deeply relevant to the legality question -- or at least to the Fair
> > Use/Fair Dealing question. The law includes explicit allowances for
> > the copying and redistribution of small portions of copyrighted texts,
> > within certain limits.
> >
> > Rick Anderson
> > Dir. of Resource Acquisition
> > University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
> > (775) 784-6500 x273
> > rickand@unr.edu