Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
In other words, they are basically doing the same thing as Google. They will honor valid claims of fair use infringement, and try to avoid the problem preemptively purely for the sake of avoiding a court case.
Yes, well the publishers certainly think so. They think everything is a violation of copyright law, because as far as they are concerned, copyright is a way of protecting their right to exploit every aspect of their work for money. Not heaven forbid to promote innovation and creation.
They would love a world in which even the books you own, you don't own. The First Sale Doctrine is the publishers' worst nightmare (something they have destroyed within the ebook market -- yay publishers) and want to use copyright as a justification to charge you for anything they can get away with. That is the REAL issue here. Publishers believe fair use is an excuse made up by people who just don't want to pay money to publishers for no reason.
I never said it's all right if Google makes money. In fact it is quite the opposite.
I was pointing out In other words, THAT is their only motivation for the whole thing. They don't make money off selling books, stealing from authors. They make money by selling ads. More searches means more ads. Therefore it is in Google's best interest to make their search engine more valuable in peoples' eyes. Hence the book snippets, which makes Google Search more useful, which makes Google your favorite search engine, which makes you use Google more often, which means you see more ads and Google makes more money.
Google is NOT exploiting authors' work in any way. They are merely making their search engine more useful, by helping you find books more easily. Whether authors want that help or not is inconsequential, since Google is doing nothing illegal and thus authors have NO rights in this matter (any more than they can stop me from quoting the same quotes, from MY copy, to my friend).
The fact that Google makes money off book snippets does not have any bearing on, well, ANYTHING, since the ONLY money they make is the money from all your future searches that you make since the book snippets makes Google stand out as a better search engine.
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I was quoting you on Google making money as it appeared to be your closing argument. Perhaps you meant it differently. I think it has a bearing on their intent and in fact making money is not a bad thing.
My personal interest in Google being a better search engine does not seem that important in the grand scheme of life. Sometimes I have to use another engine.
Google does honor takedown notices in regards to other website's content as I am sure you are aware, but seem to feel they themselves should be exempt because it would cost them money. What's up with that do you think?
Helen