Kevin Drum, Google vs. the World, Washington Monthly, October 22, 2005. Excerpt:
For many people, especially writers who benefit from copyright but would also benefit from Google's project, this case is excrutiatingly hard to form an opinion about. On the one hand, it's a truly stupendous undertaking, a boon to both popular and scholarly research that's hard to overestimate. What's more, Google's restriction of search results to small snippets demonstrates considerable sensitivity to the rights of the original authors. As a matter of public policy, it seems like a no-brainer that something like this should not only be legal, but positively encouraged. On the other hand, it's true that this isn't a use that authors had in mind when they originally published their books. And as with other database-driven collections, there's a big difference between an author excerpting one book for the purpose of illustration or criticism and a huge corporation excerpting millions — and making money off it. If it were up to me, I'd vote with the public interest. I sometimes feel that if the increasingly expansive view of copyright asserted today had been around a couple of centuries ago, the Supreme Court would have ruled that lending libraries were illegal. But just as circulating libraries have a social value that far outweighs the minimal intrusion they produce in an author's ability to control the distribution of her work, the same is true of Google's project. The technology has changed, but the principle is the same. At the same time, it's too bad this has to be decided by the courts. It's really a job for Congress, after all. Unfortunately, both Republicans and Democrats appear to be so thoroughly bought and paid for by the content industry that it's pretty much inconceivable they'd do the right thing if it were brought to a vote. So it's off to court we go, with the hope that existing law will be enough. I hope Google wins.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/23/2005 04:21:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
