Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2004 12:08:40 -0500
From: Steve Smith <sgs at aginc.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: books on google, and the copyright implications
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

ronkean at juno.com wrote:

> 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.

The *authors* wouldn't get compensation anyway.  The *copyright holders*
would get any compensation.  This concern for the author/artist is a
smokescreen for the big entertainment companies.

Last number I saw, artists got about $0.001 per "legal" downloaded
track.  Virtually all the rest goes to the labels.  (Apple isn't making
money on their downloads -- they make their money selling iPods.)

> 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?

1.  People put things on the Web for other people to look at.  If you
don't want people to see something, don't put it on the Web.  There have
been a lot of really stupid "use policies" floating around the Web; I've
seen fewer of them recently.  Perhaps the legal types are getting a clue
(nahh! :-)  (Hmm.  Now that you mention it, I think I'll put a paragraph
on indexing and search engines into my legal policy
<http://www.aginc.net/legal.htm>)

2.  If you don't want your otherwise open site to be indexed, you can
put a robots.txt file in it to control how search engines index it.  See
<http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html> for details.  Naturallly,
this only applies to reputable search folks like Google -- entertainment
companies looking for "copyright violations" and spammers harvesting
e-mail addresses ignore them.

--
Steve Smith                                    sgs at aginc dot net
Agincourt Computing                            http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."