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Originally Posted by Brian
... but as long as they respect the wishes of the copyright holders and they aren't violating copyright law
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Except: #1, they aren't respecting the wishes of the copyright holders, because they are asking Google NOT to do this.
#2, It is not clear at all if Google is within the law on this one. Remember Michael Robertson's gimmick on MP3.com that involved ripping a mountain of CDs and making them available to anyone who could prove they owned the same physical cd? Yes this is a slightly different scenario, but the same core action has to be taken: all that material has to be copied in a manner that copyright law gives to the owners. IIRC Fair Use allows you to make limited copies, of limited amounts, but clearly this goes beyond what fair use intended.
My problem with this all is two fold:
1. Google could have avoided a lot of this problem if it had gone to the major publisher's first and pitched their case. Instead, they are asking for forgiveness instead after pissing off a bunch of large corporate interests. Regardless of how anyone feels about it, that is not the smart way to do it.
2. Going with an "opt-out" option only made the situation worse, because it is asking the copyright holders to take action to prevent something they don't want happening from happening. That's not how copyright law works.
Frankly I'm getting tired of the automatic "Google good, publishers bad" knee-jerk reactions I'm seeing on this. It's one thing for google to catalog all the books in the world using readily available meta-data (title, author, publisher, etc); it's quite another thing to digitize the entire books themselves. Whether or not they as a business are entitled to do that with property they don't own is an unanswered legal question.