More on Google Book Search

Jonathan Band will be a featured speaker at the Legislative Update for MLA '07 in Philadelphia. Mr. Band is an attorney who regularly works with library associations. He is one of the most articulate defenders of the position that Google's library Book Search program is permissible under the fair use doctrine.  As I wrote recently,  scholars such as Siva Vaidhyanathan disagree with this assertion.

Tonight I read Mr. Band's paper "The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story."  He recognizes that publishers and authors (the two groups that have sued Google over this program) make plausible legal arguments, while arguing strongly that Google's fair use claims are more persuasive.

For the moment, suffice it to say that the legal battle is ongoing and complex.  I can see both sides of the debate. My concern is with this unsubstantiated claim in Band's paper: "While in theory it might be preferable from a societal point of view for the Library Project to be conducted by libraries rather than a private corporation, libraries simply do not have the resources to do so. Thus, as a practical matter, only a large search engine such as Google has both the resources and the incentive to perform this activity."

This is the unexamined assumption that has caused librarians to embrace the Google program--that nobody else in the entire world has the ability to do it. 

Obviously a local public library branch should not assume the task of digitizing and providing access to a broad swath of the world's recorded knowledge.  But is this really beyond the means of the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, and prominent national libraries around the world? If the answer proves to be yes--if privatizing knowledge via Google really is the only way to achieve these goals--that will say a lot about humanity's commitment  to sharing knowledge.

But nobody has even asked the question.

Comments

[MarkD]

Ultimately, it is not a fair use issue or even a legal issue. It is an economic issue. The problem with the Google Library Project; Google must answer to its stockholders. For the moment, Google may claim that it is acting in the public interest. But to expect any entity (especially a commercial one) to act in the public interest in perpetuity is, to be kind, wishful thinking. Once Goolge has control of all this data (particularly if no one else steps up to the plate) they will have a monopoly. Organizations that have monopolies generally exploit them. Did the library community learn nothing from the consolidation of the STM publishing industry? Marcus, if what you write is true, I am shocked to learn that librarians are not only complacent, but actually embrace this effort. Think about it for a moment – Google with the sole franchise to the electronic format of the sum of human knowledge. That doesn’t sound like progress to me, nor does it sound like an opportunity to improve access.