This whole Google Print thing seems to me to turn more on a legal issue than a business one. For the books that are out of copy right and in the public domain, the legal issues seem to be pretty
straightforward: Google can do pretty much what whatever it wants.
However, for the books still in copyright, I'm not sure the issue is quite so clear. For me, I think the issue turns on whether Google is making an index to many books, or copies of many books.
I'm sure that Google, libraries, and others have the right to make an index of books; that seems well within their rights, and is largely a new work anyway. Also, libraries have been making such indexes (card catalogues) for quite awhile, and there used to be a whole industry of
such indexes not long ago. So, for instance, if you wanted to make a subject index and list Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser under Poetry, Nebraska, that is fine and legal.
But Google wants to do more than that. They want to make a copy of all of Delights and Shadows, and then let people search to see if the book contains certain keywords. They will then display the result of the search and a few words on either side, but not the whole page. They are not planning on placing any ads next to the content at this time, and therefore are not planning on making any money from this directly.
Would this be legal? It seems to me that, at least in the circumstance I'm describing, it would not be. Excerpting even one line of poetry without permission (and Delights and Shadows is most certainly a book of poetry), unless for a use that is covered by fair use, is illegal and a violation of copyright. And Google's usage isn't fair use: they are not expliciting the work, nor are they using it as the basis for a discussion, nor are they parodying the work. Therefore, at least in my understanding of fair use, they cannot say that their usage is covered
by fair use.
It seems to me that what Google is doing is more akin to making a bunch of copies of copyrighted work, and then making an index to where they made the copies from. This is illegal: nobody can make a copy of something without the copyright holders permission (harkening back to the definition of the word, they do not have the right to make a copy).
I think that most publishers, myself included, are not objecting to Google Print on business grounds but on legal one's. We don't like the prospect of our copyrights being eroded; if what google is doing is legal, then why would it not be illegal for someone to scan in all the books they own into a database on their computer? While doing so may not erode sales of paper books (after all, they had to buy the book in the first place), it would certainly make ebook versions of such books less salable, and would probably be illegal even if it didn't effect future sales.
While from a business perspective, or even a utilitarian perspective, it may make more sense to let Google Print continue unimpeded, at least from a legal standpoint where the focus is to protect one's right to intellectual property, it makes all the sense in the world to stop them.
Posted by John on August 24, 2005
Tags: Blog
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