Steve Baker on Slashdot regarding Google Print – they recently resumed scanning of books – wrote (used with permission):
“I don’t see any difference between what Google are doing here and
what they do to index web sites.
[They] roam the web – they take local copies of every web page – they
index those pages – then they display a ’snippet’ of the page in
response to a search query.
Same deal with the books. Scan them into a private archive, index the
archive – display the title and a sentence or two of content to
provide context. I see no problem with that.
What is problematic (both with the Web indexing and Book indexing) is
the Google ’cache’ – where you can get the content of the web page
from [Google’s] cache if the original web page is missing or slow. That
is (in my opinion) a breach of the Web page owner’s copyright – and
would be a breech of the book’s copyright too.
However, the indexing service that Google (and others) provide for the
Web is the only thing that makes the Internet useful. Doing that for
books would be of HUGE benefit to mankind and absolutely must be
allowed – even if copyright law has to be changed to make it happen.
Let’s think carefully about the ’Google cache’ thing though – that’s
dubious because it allows people access to content without going
through the content provider’s access mechanisms. That’s the thing
that deprives the author of value. Indexing actually increases the
value of a work because it allows people to find it – and therefore
increases the pool of potential purchasers by an enormous factor.
Google indexing should be the savior of printed media and authors
should support it.
Google caching is morally dubious.”
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