To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: books on google, and the copyright implications
From: shofmann at mindspring.com (Scott Hofmann)
Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 11:07:52 -0500
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

>>>>> "r" == ronkean  <ronkean at juno.com> writes:

 r> On Fri, 24 Dec 2004 02:33:08 -0500 (EST) "Keith F. Lynch"
 r> <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
 r> the web.
 >> > Eventually, that could mean vastly more than 5,000 books
 >> accessible for the cost of an internet connection.  Thereby a billion
 r> or
 >> more people could each have a library of hundreds of thousands of
 >> volumes.
 >>
 >> Doesn't this duplicate Project Gutenberg?
 >>

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

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

The answer is they may not be. One of the reasons why Google News has never
left "beta" status is because of threatened lawsuits by the news companies
over copyright infringement. Wired wrote about this in detail at
http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65106,00.html.

The short of it is that as long as the service remains free and "beta" Google
is reasonably safe from lawsuits but the moment they make money from it they're
going to be hit by a number of lawsuits from big companies with deep pockets.

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

I believe that their use is covered by the "fair use" provisions of copyright
law.

scott

--
J. Scott Hofmann                      http://www.kniggets.org
shofmann at mindspring.com