Re: Google's Card Catalog Should Be Left Open

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I don't want to step into the discussion (which is fascinating) about how
to think of Google's indexing activity, but the statement at the end of
Eric Hellman's post gives me pause:  " if a person can't read it, it's not
a copy."  It seems to me that it is a legitimate business enterprise to
create content that can be read by machines.  For example,
text-to-speech-synthesis technology incorporatates dictionaries, which are
put in a form that a human could not read.  I would think that the
publisher of that dictionary would have a right to be compensated for such
uses.  In my salad days I published dictionaries and licensed any number
of content databases for machine use.  This is bound to be a growth area
for publishers.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Eric Hellman" <eric@openly.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, September 26, 2005 5:09 PM
Subject: RE: Google's Card Catalog Should Be Left Open

> 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
>
> --
>
> Eric Hellman, President                            Openly Informatics, 
> Inc.
> eric@openly.com                                    2 Broad St., 2nd Floor
> tel 1-973-509-7800 fax 1-734-468-6216              Bloomfield, NJ 07003
> http://www.openly.com/1cate/      1 Click Access To Everything