Judge gives Google more time for digital library talks Google and American authors and publishers have been given an extra nine months to come up with a solution to the ongoing legal dispute over the web giant's proposed digital library. The Chocolate Factory had already come to a settlement in the case, originally brought by the publishers against Google's plan to scan loads of …
Your right on principal, but I fear Google's ability to contribute to campaigns (read: BUY politicians) will give them more leverage on this argument than the 0$ that the collective orphaned works authors are willing/able to contribute. US is fast becoming a buy the rich for the rich country... I would say that Animal Farm should be required reading at least twice in public schools, but I'm afraid it's too late for people to even get the obvious warnings that it has to offer.
I don't get what Google gains from all this. The rights and wrongs of Google claim rights on the orphaned works aside. How are they planning to monetize these books? I's not as if you can read a book from cover to cover using Google books. Have they plans to use this that they've not put into action yet?
Google is advertising company 1st search company 2nd, this helps both.
It provides millions of books worth of data to add to their locally controlled search content, that will only be reached by searching on Google. Though many of these orphaned works have been replaced by new works with more accurate information, these older works rights owners are "unknown" and can therefore be stolen by Google, instead of having to pay a cut to the actual author and publisher.
And of course the whole time you are searching and reading these works Google gets to A:) serve paid ads to you (their bread and butter) and B:) collect more data on YOU, and the public in general: what books are YOU reading, what topics do You search spend time on, and of course what topics are interesting to the public at large. Then they can take this goldmine of data, find out what the public and YOU really want, and find ways to sell it to you, or at least broker ads for others to sell it to you.
If the US feels this is a useful service, Google should only be allowed to do it on BEHALF of the us population, without being able to own, or search the data, it should be owned by the general public, and a private company could act as a regulator, with very minimal profit margins built into the contract - just enough to make it worth while. Of course with these stipulations Google would not be as interested.
There does seem to be an assumption throughout this (if I'm wrong please feel free to correct me - I know you will!) that all orphaned books have unknown American owners and therefore this whole scheme should benefit the 'us population').
Last time I looked, English language books were being written by Indians, Australians, New Zealanders and (racking my brains here) the British themselves - sorry if I've left anybody out!
And what about books written in Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, French etc - are there not orphaned works in any language other than American?
Surely any settlement Google makes should benefit the world?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
