Google settles Book Search suit for $125m Google has agreed to pay $125m to settle a three-year-old class action lawsuit that accused the ad broker of infringing publisher and author copyrights with its library-digitizing Book Search project. After Google launched the project in 2004, several major libraries allowed the company to scan their collections and serve them …
google is steamrollering along and doing whatever the hell they like. They should be asking permission of the copyright holders before digitising, not setting up somewhere for copyright holder to object if they happen to notice that google have done it.
Its the same with streetview, instead of asking your permission to plaster your mug all over the net, they are claiming it as your responsibility to notice it and object after they've done it.
The authors should be state funded in relation to quality (as judged by a large panel of authors in their field) and quantity (god help us Enid Blyton and wotsizname who wrote that Da Vinci crap). Copyright should be folded into this as an identifier of authorship till something better is found. Then all books and other publications (scientific, social, gossip, dirty) should be digitized and made freely available to the public.
End of trade secrets, patent hogging, misleading ads for big fat turds of books, magazine or newspaper or journal monopoly owners hogging "entertainment" material etc etc. Huge advance for knowledge, culture, innovation, social awareness and all the latest on Paris. Huge sigh of relief from poor countries and poor people everywhere.
Google is showing the way it can be done. Sure, it has a working commercial model, but what the fuck do you expect in the US or our sick retarded and retarding capitalist world.
Capitalism is clogging the arteries of the world, and if we don't clean em up soon the world will have the mother of all heart attacks. It's been at least a century since capitalism could truthfully claim it advances knowledge, culture, innovation etc. What little progress it has presided over has been forced upon it, combated by it, and most of the time represented a kind of collective planned approach that's anathema to it. Socialism eating it up from inside.
Time to end the capitalist monopoly (enforced by arms and blackmail and wars) on goverment and the management of finance and production.
(Paris cos she'd enjoy total world penetration)
Whether or not I side with the copyright holders on this.
As I understand, Google only made available out-of-copyright and out-of-print books. So I couldn't just go to a shop and buy the book. I could maybe find a copy in a second hand book store (which is legally fuzzy - a lot of books I've seen forbid resale) or at a library, but I don't think that the copyright holders see any money from either of these. So Google Book Search becomes the easiest way to find a book than can no longer be purchased first-hand; a copy that will give the author money.[
On the other hand, if Google is making a profit from advertising alongside copyrighted works then the copyright holders should quite rightly have a share of it.
Welcome the day when I can get a decent acid-free, quality print of an out-of-print book at a reasonable cost since so many publishers can't be bothered to reprint anything unless it's selling a bazillion copies a week (and yes, I know part of the problem is stupid tax laws that punish them for keeping copies in warehouses ready to ship like they used to do...).
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