Comments on: Sergey Brin on Google Books

By: Frank Wilhoit

Frank Wilhoit — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:31:14 +0000

Only two words in Brin's screed are significant: "...after 1923..."

The rest is deduction, framing, and respiration.

The public domain preserves content.

Copyright is only about one thing: restricting access to content. Content that has been physically destroyed is absolutely inaccessible; that is copyright's logical conclusion.

By: David Hall

David Hall — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:00:43 +0000

LexisNexis did not use a settlement to gain access to works where it cannot find the copyright holders (orphan works) or placing extra restrictions on liberally licensed and public domain works.

Nothing wrong with preserving works, but Google has really been unnecessarily stubborn in regards to being forthright with the licenses on public domain and liberally licensed works, instead putting a noncommercial license on items created by the federal government and freely available for download from an agency's web site. Sergey Brin's arguments just fall apart in regards to their implementation on these works.

By: Rafe

Rafe — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:18:59 +0000

I'm not sure where Google is at fault, though. Google wants to spend the money to the scan all the books with the thought that they will make money on the scanned content in the end. For books that are already in the public domain, that is their right, just as Project Gutenberg can put them online for free and Dover can sell them in bargain editions for a buck apiece. Obviously for books that are still covered, some agreement has to be reached.

I think that we (as a civilization) should be careful not to let Google control that market, but I'm not sure Google is doing anything anti-competitive here. (Maybe I'm ignorant.) I think a comparison to Lexis-Nexus could be made that's informative.

By: Jacob Davies

Jacob Davies — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:11:40 +0000

When it's Google pushing the idea that it's Google or nobody, I am pretty dubious. They did not invent the idea of scanning all the world's books and making them available, nor are they the only entity trying to make that happen. However, because there is a natural monopoly position, they are trying to get a jump on everyone else and use their early position to enforce a monopoly. Our corpus of literature is not something that can be owned (or have significant private rights owned) by one private corporation.

I could care less about author's rights. What I care about is that online access to the sum of human knowledge should not be left to one corporation through inaction. And the statement that "nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort" is disingenuous, as it ignores the existence of natural monopolies. There is enormous cost to scanning and enormous financial value in being the provider of material in a position to put advertising on it and (I think ultimately much more significantly) to own the search stream. (That's actually the part I am most concerned about - the private ownership of library search data.)

I'm not down on Google in general but I am unhappy about their behavior in this. The word "monopoly" does not appear once in that article, and how can a good-faith discussion about this fail to mention that?

By: Rafe

Rafe — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:44:48 +0000

I’m with you on that. Better the government than Google, but better Google than nobody.

By: Jacob Davies

Jacob Davies — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:12:23 +0000

The idea of scanning, indexing, and making available our enormous literary legacy is a good one.

The idea of one commercial company doing it and "owning" the result in some way is an extraordinarily bad one.

This is a project the Library of Congress should pursue with public funding and, if necessary, partnerships with private technology companies.

We should be very cautious about handing out monopoly rights of this sort. (And this is just about as strong a natural monopoly as one could ask for.)