<p>Since the mid-2000s, The Author’s Guild and Google have been in and out of the courts over claims that Google’s book digitization project violates copyright law. Google argues that book digitization benefits the public by democratizing knowledge and that it doesn’t earn ad revenue from the project. On the other hand, the Author’s Guild claims that the project disregards authors’/publishers’ rights. This week, a federal judge sided with Google. </p>
<p>In the ruling, Judge Chin stated that Google benefits society in the following ways:</p>
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<p>What do you think? Do you think that Google Books is a revolutionary project? </p>
<p>I know when I’ve been doing research on technical subjects I’ve found Google’s book search to be much more useful than their generalized web search (or often scholar, since that only indexes papers and patents). I’ve actually wound up buying a few textbooks since the sections I was able to get to were written clearly and concisely. No way I would have ever found those books without since they weren’t stocked in my school’s library.</p>
<p>An author I like made a point about this case that goes beyond google books and using it as a research tool. The problem with this decision is the judge decided under fair use it was okay if a site like Google doesn’t have 100% of the book scanned in and/or available, so if someone wanted to read the whole book they couldn’t use Google books to bypass having to get a copy. </p>
<p>The problem is it leaves open a gray area that could be a problem. For example, suppose one site has the even number pages and the other site has the odd number pages. According to this ruling, this is legal, since neither site has 100% of the full book, but it would be pretty easy, knowing what they have, to create something that allows someone to download the full content which is the concern. An unscrupulous firm could create two different web sites just to do that, and technically would fit the ruling. </p>
<p>I think having something where you can look up references in books is invaluable, it would have been great for writing papers and doing other research, but I do share the concerns of the writers in this case, that this could open the door for unscrupulous operators to stay within the law, though in a gray fashion, and rip off the people who own the copyrights. There are far too many people out there who think that they have the right to get things for free (and then complain when a favorite artist suddenly no longer is getting recordings out, cause they don’t sell enough) and I am concerned the judge may have opened the door for this, unwittingly. Google has some questionable ethics when it comes to privacy, but I don’t think that is their intent, but others I guarantee are looking at this figuring out an angle to make a buck cheating the people who created the works out of their living.</p>