I spent some time yesterday and this morning speaking with Allan Alder, counsel for the AAP (see my initial post on this here). I came away convinced of what I initially suspected but so far had not stated: this is a far bigger issue than simply book publishers wanting to protect their business models (though there's plenty of that in here as well.)...[T]here are a few larger issues percolating here that bear discussion. First, who is making the money? Second, who owns the rights to leverage this new innovation - the public, the publisher, or ... Google? Will Google make the books it scans available for all comers to crawl and index? Certainly the answer seems to be no. Google is doing this so as to make its own index superior, and to gain competitive advantage over others. That leaves a bad taste in the publisher's mouths - they sense they are being disintermediated, and further, that Google is reinterpreting copyright law as they do it. And this is not just about books. If Google - and by extension, anyone else - can scan and index books without permission, why can't they also scan and index video? Look at who owns the book companies that are suing - ahhh, it's Newscorp (Harper Collins), Viacom (Simon&Schuster), Time Warner (Little Brown). As I said, I plan more posts/pieces on this, as the issues raised - of innovation, of intellectual property rights, of business models, of more perfect search - are fascinating. But they are also nuanced in that they reflect some of our most treacherous technology/policy debates: the tension between DRM and innovation, between a creator's rights and the public good, between open and closed (the Craigslist/Oodle debate, for example, is very much related to this). After staring at this for a day or so, it's clear to me that this case will go to court. No one wants to settle. Google is digging in, and so is the media world. Folks, we have a real battle on our hands.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/21/2005 10:03:00 AM.
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.
