Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor514ce
You're right. I equate copyright infringement, on the scale practiced by Google (complete, systematic, wholescale) as tantamount to theft, in my moral rainbow. Others do not. Be that as it may, it is still odd to applaud Google for their actions, in this specific case (Book Registry, etc.), since those were not Google's actions. Those were actions Google was forced to make because of a legal settlement.
Google chose to ignore existing laws because they stood in the way of what they wanted to do.
You may feel the laws were unjust to start with, and that Google's goals were beneficent and consistent with your own. Surely you see the slippery slope, though, don't you? That might be true in this one instance, but doesn't it set a rather dangerous precedent? I'm not comfortable with that.
I'm glad that they were caught, sued, and forced to make amends, as rabidly ridiculous as that might seem.
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you are completely right, my judgement here is thoroughly coloured by my feelings about copyright law and the greed and immorality that the current copyright law embodies ; that is why i perceive google as "fighting the good fight" despite the fact that their motivations were surely not noble or altruistic (although if it's true that they are still losing money on this project, i have to wonder just what their motivations were... perhaps they are nobler and more altruistic than we give them credit for). and that is why i don't equate copyright infringement with theft : having read quite a few of Eric Flint's editorials about copyright, its origins, and its true purpose (on the Baen site), among other things, i confess that i see current copyright law as a complete, systematic, wholesale pillaging of our cultural heritage, for the profit of a few greedy copyright holders (*cough*
disney*cough*).
yes, ignoring a law because it's inconvenient to our goals can be a slippery slope and it is true that on principle, in the absolute, people should not be allowed to get away with it, and corporations even less than individuals ; so perhaps it was necessary to make google pay to set a precedent for when it's not google scanning copyright books to preserve our cultural heritage, but big oil devastating natural reserves in the name of an easy profit. i think that's the point you're trying to make, and it's a valid point.
nonetheless, as an individual, i can allow myself to make exceptions in my own mind based on extenuating circumstances or specific situations (and in fact so can a judge), and in this
specific instance, i remain convinced that overall google's actions are serving a greater good (and are possibly even motivated by that good, at least partially... you never know) and are far more defendable than copyright law, in its current form. so i'm happy about what they're doing, and what it will be bringing us (and by "us" i mean us, individuals and members of global society), and i'm really glad they will be able to continue to do it, and i am thrilled that the next time i want to determine the public domain status of a particular out of print translation of an obscure novel by a hungarian author, with a little luck, i'll be able to consult google's registry (and possibly even obtain the text from google books), instead of fruitlessly exchanging emails with any number of friendly but ultimately helpless hungarian homonymic translators / officials of the copyright bureau / editors, while the novel slips that much further into obscurity, all because a few obscenely rich copyright holders wanted to get that much richer and had the money and influence to insure that they would, to the detriment of all the rest of us.