Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Google's fighting to not have to do opt-in. They don't want to have to contact every author & publisher of the thousands, maybe millions, of out-of-print works they've scanned.
Scanning is easy & quick (relatively) and can be done in bulk; finding & contacting copyright owners is slow and separate and requires tracking progress individually for each title. Removing books by request is easy; getting permission before starting is hard.
And I think there's no way they're going to get the agreement signed off in its current opt-out status. Or if they did, it'd immediately get bumped to a higher court, because it really does directly clash with the basic system of how copyright works.
All that work of scanning out-of-print works will be (mostly) wasted (it'll help with search abilities, but it won't make them real money)... and if they want to change that, they'll need to turn their attentions to changing copyright law. Which I'm much in favor of; I'd love Google to start pushing for a coherent & useful orphan works policy, and establish standards for what counts as a reasonable search for copyright owners. Google has the resources to make that possible; I'd love to see them work *with* the EFF to get us better copyright laws and enforcement policies.
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I agree, especially since the current state of copyright law is the result of a corporation's fixing the legislative process.
Who has more clout these days, Google or Disney?