Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
This isn't about search.
It's about Google violating millions of copyrights, and forcing authors to opt out of their system.
It would be like Random House grabbing books off a library shelf that were written in 1930, not published by RH, putting out electronic versions, without asking authors for permission, without checking anyone's copyrights, and dictating royalty rates. I can only imagine the digital screeches that would result from such actions. (Why Google gets a pass is beyond me.)...
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I would suggest avoiding such definitive statements like your first sentence, as it's certainly not clear that Google has violated millions of copyrights. As far as opting out goes, Google actually has a very good fair use argument and may not have to provide an opt-out at all.
To be clear, Google is not just making books available for free - the controversy is Google scanning the books at all to make them searchable and providing "snippets" or previews of the books.
From Wikipedia:
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A click on a result from Google Books opens an interface in which the user may view pages from the book, if out of copyright or if the copyright owner has given permission. Books in the public domain are available in "full view" and free for download. For in-print books where permission has been granted, the number of viewable pages is limited to a "preview" set by a variety of access restrictions and security measures, some based on user-tracking.[2] For books where permission for a "preview" has been refused, only permission for "snippets" (two to three lines of text) may be permitted, but the full text of the book is searchable on this limited basis. Where the owner of a book cannot be identified, a "snippet" view may be implemented. For other books that have neither a "full view", nor "preview", nor a "snippet" view, the text is not searchable at all, and Google Books provides no identification of content beyond the book title. For this reason, Google-Books searches are an unreliable indicator of the prevalence of specific usages or terms, because many authoritative works fall into the unsearchable category.
Most scanned works are no longer in print or commercially available.[3] For those which are, the site provides links to the website of the publisher and booksellers.
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There are groups in the publishing community that question whether any third party should be able to copy and index copyrighted works so that users can search through them, even if all a user sees is the bibliographic information and a few snippets of text. This really serves to make certain books more widely discoverable online and help the authors and publishers sell more of them (if they're still in print).