Last night I attended the Harry Potter premiere. Best one yet. But that has nothing to do with this photograph–or this post, really.

I also attended a discussion on Google’s Print Library Project (now called Google Book Search) at the New York Public Library. The people involved in the discussion included Allan Adler of the Association of American Publishers, Google VP David Drummond, Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School / Creative Commons (I caught photographed him while he was deep in thought, apparently), and Nick Taylor of The Authors Guild.

Besides dominating the world of information transaction, Google has approached some of the top university libraries and started a program where written public works are scanned for online searching. The problem is that Google has now decided that they will provide snippets of copyrighted works unless the copyright holder “opts out” of the program.

I use Google religiously, but am slowly coming to believe that their dominance is turning them into our modern day evil. Unlike a library, they are not purchasing books–they are making free digital copies of the books for their use, and then placing limitations on the libraries in regards to the online works. The copying itself is illegal according to copyright law! Despite Drummond’s claim that they will not be placing advertisements on the Book Search pages, Google does provide “Buy this Book” links. This is ultimately bad for the book industry because it provides more exposure to the particular companies that Google handpicks (keep in mind this is regardless of the advertisement links).

I think Google has a great idea, but the digitization of printed works should be completed by the copyright holders themselves, a non-profit organization, or The Library of Congress, not a for-profit company. By creating a proprietary card catalog, Google is creating yet another offering that attracts traffic to them. Furthermore, it should not be at the expense of a copyright holder’s time to have to “opt-out” of something.

In closing, if Amazon and MSN Book Search can license portions of public works, I think the world’s biggest search engine can, too.

Oh, and I’m looking forward to reading all of the Harry Potter books before the next film comes out. On non-digitized books that I own legally, I might add.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 9:43 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.