"...here's a snippet from a forthcoming Wired Magazine piece by Larry Lessig, courtesy of the Pho list (sorry there's no link; the article's evidently not online yet) :
- Google creates value -- a lot of it -- by indexing existing content.
But when it comes to books, the content owners want a slice of that value
-- and who wouldn't? No publisher ever said, "I'll lose money on
book sales, but I'll make it up from Internet searches." They
therefore intone "grave misgivings" about copyright in order to
demand a piece of the action: money. It's an old technique (the Motion
Picture Association of America famously tried it against Sony Betamax).
But the inspiration is not copyright, it's Tony Soprano.
- Google wants to index content. Never in the history of copyright law would anyone have thought that you needed permission from a publisher to index a book's content. Imagine if a library needed consent to create a card catalog. But Google indexes by "copying." And since 1909, US copyright law has given copyright holders the exclusive right to control copies of their works. "Bingo!" say the content owners.
- But the Congress that altered the copyright statutes in 1909 didn't have Google Print in mind. By copy, Congress meant the sort of act that would be in competition with the incentives that copyright law was (fittingly) meant to establish for authors. Nothing in what Google wants to do affects those incentives to creativity."
- Google wants to index content. Never in the history of copyright law would anyone have thought that you needed permission from a publisher to index a book's content. Imagine if a library needed consent to create a card catalog. But Google indexes by "copying." And since 1909, US copyright law has given copyright holders the exclusive right to control copies of their works. "Bingo!" say the content owners.
Head of Image Resources & Copyright Management
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Tel +972-2-670-8874
Fax +972-2-670-8064 ---
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