Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor514ce
Google was only offering "portions" online. Thus those who use those portions are within fair use. But Google themselves scanned entire books, for their own commercial purposes, some of which we know. But Google is in the content monetization business. Their act of scanning entire books was the copyright violation, not Google users' browsing portions thereof.
The rest of your post is well-reasoned and appreciated.
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I am not sure that scanning an entire book per say is a copyright violation. Certainly content shifting for personal use is perfectly legal; i.e. if I scanned a paper book and only used it myself, I am certainly engaged in a fair use of the book (in the same way that ripping a CD into mp3 files is fair use).
Likewise, the profit motive does not, in itself, make the action a violation of copyright. If I write a book review and quote portions of said book in my review, even if I am being paid for my review, I am not violating fair use.
Ultimately, I am arguing here that neither position is correct or incorrect. Fair Use is akin to the Measurement Problem in quantum mechanics (where a particle can be treated as being in two places at once until you measure it); you can't be sure whether a use constitutes fair use until it has been tested by the courts. Since Google was the first company to be sued for such a specific practice, we have no rock hard legal case law to judge the likely outcome of the case.
The other thing we need to keep in mind here is that purpose of copyright is to serve public good, not the good of the content providers. Now, that does not mean that the authors do not benefit from copyright; they certainly do. However, the benefit to the authors is the method not the goal. My personal feeling on this is that fair use should be allowed up until the point that it can be shown that an author or their publisher is actually harmed by the use, or actually, until the "harm" can be shown to be great enough to serve as a disincentive to create. Therefore, if someone makes a copyrighted work, that they do not have any rights to, available for free download (or for pay) on the internet, they are clearly violating copyright law since those who download the work now lack the incentive to purchase a legitimate copy. On the flip side, I am not sure any harm was done to publishers or authors by Google's actions.
Ultimately, the proper place for all works is in the public domain; the only real question is how much, and for how long should the authors of said works benefit. (A number of publishers can do manage to benefit from publishing Public Domain works so their needs are of secondary importance).
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Bill