Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor514ce
This is a settlement. Google was forced into this because of immense pressure from the publishing industry. Google's Book project was a massive, systematic raping of copyright, and everyone knew it. Everyone seems to be praising Google for this, but this is a settlement from a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild. Praise them, instead (there was also a separate suit by the Association of American Publishers on behalf of five big publishers). Google aren't the good guys, here. They violated copyright, and are side-stepping a judgment by this settlement.
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i understand your point and while this is technically true i tend to nuance my judgement with the fact that current copyright law is bloated and abusive and has completely occulted the original spirit and motivation of its creation. so i can't consider copyright law / holders to be 100% the side of good (in other words, i make a very significant disctinction here between the legality and the morality / ethicality of these actions). therefore, even if copyright was infringed to some degree, i'm not convinced this is necessarily such an undefendable thing (it might be moreso, if copyright laws were more reasonable).
also, many books which are still in copyright are also out of print and incredibly hard (or impossible) to find. this is one of the very dangerous side-effects of the current copyright law. with this in mind, google is actually safeguarding a significant portion of our collective culture for posterity, and making it far more accessible than publishers have / could.
and since the publishers are ultimately the ones who are simultaneously profiting the most from the current copyright laws and falling down on the job about making (especially obscure and therefore less profitable) copyright works available, my view is that google is actually doing them a favor to some degree, and more importantly, doing future generations of readers a favor by giving them the chance to discover books which might otherwise have been lost forever.
i do grant you that some aspects of google's actions are less justifiable, for example the original opt-out (rather than opt-in) approach for books which are still in print and still in copyright, but nonetheless *all* the parties involved (including the publishers and the authors, that is to say the plaignants in the case) recognize that the true winners in this case are the readers.
i just don't think it's quite as black and white as your post makes it seem.