Quote:
Originally Posted by latepaul
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.
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In the US fair use doctrine, just because a copy is unauthorized, doesn't mean that it violates copyright. I suspect that the reason Google didn't try to arrange licenses in advance is two fold. First, it is completely impossible to do that since you would have to contact each copyright holder individually. The music industry has a couple of music clearing houses that you can use, but that is part of a long standing consent decree. Books doesn't have such a mechanism. The second is that non commercial archiving has been upheld in the past. That's why so many libraries have things like back issues of newspapers and magazines on microfliche. The idea that individuals can make backups comes from this case history, not the reverse.
It really doesn't have anything to do with Google having a lot of money and lawyers, but rather that they were on pretty firm legal footing in doing so. Where they ran into trouble is when they started talking about selling the digitized books. That does require licensing with the copyright holders.
There is actually a lot of case law with regards to copyright and fair use. Fair use is for the most part common law (i.e. judgical rather than legislative), though it was finally included in the copyright act from the mid 70's.
One of the issues here is that some want everything to be black or white, while in reality, it's simply various shades of grey.