Quote of the Day
by JS
The dilemma for many of the critics is that virtually all agree that the settlement does a lot of good, and they don’t necessarily want it struck down. Google’s book scanning project will bring new life to millions of out-of-print books, making them available at libraries across the country, and potentially providing a new source of revenue for authors and publishers, as my colleague Motoko Rich described earlier this year.
I’m not sure how I feel about the Google book search settlement. Does Google get to monitor in-library searches of its archive? What effect will this have on potential competitor entry into the digitization/search space? What about future innovation? Isn’t this just a workaround for long standing copyright issues? Why give a compulsory license to a single company? What happens to new works?
So many questions.
I don’t want to discount the benefits. Publishers and authors need the additional revenue, and Google’s search technology is a natural way to add value to the collected published sum of knowledge that books represent. But the arguments for the agreement seem to assume that the private goals of Google will align with the public good provided by a book search service. While this may be true for the moment, the future may bring surprises.
