Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
Yes, I understood that's what you meant. Certainly even if you are doing something legal, good, and within your rights, you might chose to respect someone's wishes and not do that thing, just to be polite or sociable or whatever.
I don't think this should be one of those times.
If what Google is gong is within their rights, if they are NOT infringing on the copyrights of the authors, then it's an important public service in the spirit of why fair use (and copyright itself) exists, and they would be diminishing the value to society if Google acquiesced to an author requesting that Google voluntary curtail their own rights for no good reason.
It would be like a government saying "People desperately need this water supply, and we're properly and responsibly invoking eminent domain to build a pipeline across all your properties and save people's lives. But if you don't like t, just tell us and we'll opt you out, we'll just build around your property, costing millions of dollars extra, years of delay, and costing more lives. you have no right to ask us to do that, we just want to be nice."
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Copyright is not a law of nature nor is it absolute.
It is a *limited* boon granted by government to promote the public good. Among those limits is fair use. And the single most basic form of fair use is quotation.
When Google started their effort they were doing questionable things with the so-called "orphan books". Things the AG tried to condone in exchange for cash. That got tossed out.
What remained was fair use.
But the since the AG is against most forms of fair use anyway, they'll still be fighting this right up to the moment the asteroid hits.
