Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
And, just to remind people, Google would have allowed authors and estates to charge, for the eBooks, whatever they wanted up to $29.99, of which the rights-holder would get $18.89 (63 percent). It is only the titles where no rights-holder came forward (or where the rights holder was content with the Google recommendation) where Google would set the price, 63 percent of which would go to the Books Rights Registry.
This all seems to me a little like the accepted ASCAP music royalty scheme.
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Which all sounds reasonable, and is I suppose, but what irked me was the way they went about it.
For anyone else, if you wanted to set up a business based on copying copyrighted works then you'd need to arrange licenses in advance. Google just went ahead and did it. Then they acted as if not showing more than a snippet at a time was not a copyright violation, which may be true, except that the copy they had made in order to do that was unauthorised. So even if they scanned it and never showed it to anyone it was an unauthorised copy. The fact that this was ruled to be fair use, as if Google were you or I making copies for personal use, well it doesn't seem to me what fair use was intended for.
I concede that the end result would have been a good thing but it's the sense that Google feels that because of that (or because they can afford armies of lawyers) the rules don't really apply to them, it's that that annoys me.