An Alternative to Google Book Search
Today's front page, above the fold article about the Open Content Alliance (OCA) was a good reminder that there are alternatives to Google Book Search. Librarians who are ambivalent about the ethics of allowing their collections to be scanned by Google--which doesn't make money directly from the scans, but can claim an indirect burnishment to its reputation--have somewhere else to go. The big differences: the OCA is a non-profit organization, and it will allow the books it scans to be accessible to all search engines (not just Google.)
Keeping those benefits in mind, the ethics of going with the OCA are ambiguous. Google will scan books for free, at a scale that will be very hard for a non-commercial entity to match. To a large extent OCA participants will have to rely on grant funds, a financing system that is inherently unreliable. In short: Google will get offline content online much sooner, even if is not as open as librarians would like it to be.
The OCA will focus on out-of-copyright works, avoiding the legal tensions that have befallen Google's plans for library books of more recent vintage. So the crucial determination about what copyright protection actually entails in the digital age is still just beyond our grasp.
Four legs and open content good! Two legs and Google bad!
It's pleasing to see the OCA group get some free publicity. But I wanted to make an important point: you are letting Google and others frame the "debate." There is no debate about protecting an author's rights, and the "crucial determination" about what copyright is isn't "beyond our grasp." The answer to that riddle is only outside the reality of those who think that systematized stealing on a mega-scale is legal. The invention of the photocopier did not magically make massive copyright violation for profit legal, and neither did the invention of "Google Print."
Posted by: Bill Cash | October 23, 2007 at 08:53 AM
The question remains: in the digital world, what is "theft?" Using the Web to create new markets for works that would have foundered in obsolescence otherwise? In my book, that's not quite the same as industrial photocopying of raiding the shelves of the local Borders.
Posted by: Marcus | October 23, 2007 at 01:27 PM
Deep down, this whole debate is mostly just a tale of two spectres. :)
Posted by: Bill Cash | October 24, 2007 at 10:09 PM