To: WSFAlist at WSFA.org
Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2004 10:28:03 -0500
Subject: [WSFA] books on google, and the copyright implications
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

On Fri, 24 Dec 2004 02:33:08 -0500 (EST) "Keith F. Lynch"
<kfl at KeithLynch.net> writes:
> ronkean at juno.com wrote:
>
> > Google has started a project to digitize and index
> out-of-copyright books, making them accessible via a search function on
the web.
> > Eventually, that could mean vastly more than 5,000 books
> accessible for the cost of an internet connection.  Thereby a billion
or
> more people could each have a library of hundreds of thousands of
> volumes.
>
> Doesn't this duplicate Project Gutenberg?
>

It does sound a lot like Project Gutenberg, but there are differences.
With Gutenberg, you go to a website and select whole works to peruse or
download, and the number of works available (for now) is not huge.  With
the Google plan, you would go to a website and be given the option to
search for keywords, phrases, or some such search criteria, and then the
relevant hits would appear from the whole universe of indexed texts.  So
it's more focused on searching the universe of books for specific subject
matter as opposed to downloading selected whole works.

Google seems to be going about it in a big way, looking to make deals
with some large university libraries to scan and index vast amounts of
material.  One report I read lamented that google would probably also be
doing copyrighted works, and that the authors would not receive
compensation.

This raises a question about google and copyright.  Gooogle indexes and
caches billions of websites.  The caching, combined with delivering the
content to google users, seems, on the face of it, to be a copyright
violation, absent permission.  And many websites explicitly claim
copyright.  So how does google get away with these seeming copyright
violations?

Ron Kean

.