(no subject)

[eirias]

A nice op-ed piece by Tim O'Reilly on a clash between Google and authors. The gist: Google wants to digitize entire university libraries and make the content searchable, with only snippets available online; the Authors' Guild contends that this is copyright infringement.

It will be very interesting to watch what happens to copyright law over the next thirty years.

Comments

[cognative.livejournal.com]

As of now I can copy a book and post it on the net for free. Would this google thing really pose that much more of a threat than copy machines and pdf files already have?

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, you can, and technically I imagine that's illegal. Like anything, they'll only come after you if there's money to be gained by so doing, or money to be lost by refraining. Google is a big fish and provides content to a ton of people; if they were systematically providing whole libraries worth of content, a lot of money would be at stake. What they're actually trying to do is quite different - much more akin to Amazon's snippets - but the process by which they're doing it freaks out the Authors' Guild. I don't know; I don't think their response is all that logical, but I do see why they're freaking out more majorly about this than they would if I digitized a trashy romance novel and threw it up on the 'net.