Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Isn't the whole point of it not being opt-in to prevent unknown or difficult to track down rights ownership and publisher apathy from basically removing most books from their list?
They might be a private company... but what they are trying to do is most definitely of considerable service to the public. In light of that... why should the publisher that owns rights to over 20,000 books be able to continue to keep all 19,000+ of them out of print by doing nothing... instead of being required to actively opt-out for the 100+ books they actually don't want Google fooling around with because they plan to bring them back into print within the foreseeable future and/or have competing titles on the market?
- Ahi
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Personally I agree with you. I'm just stating what I believe would be the correct action based on current law.
Yes, I think the basic principle behind making out-of-print books, which are not generating any revenue for the rights holders anyway, available is a noble cause. I also believe that it wouldn't be necessary without the gross evolution of copyright law to serve the rights holders interestes at the expense of public domain. Most of those out of print titles should be freely available already.
However, rather than give Google an exception to the current way things work, I think the law itself should be changed.