Quote:
Originally Posted by igorsk
Spider Robinson already knew where it all will lead in 1983. Some of those "government people" need to read it. |
:Bows Deeply to Igorsky: A magnificent and appropriate story...
Many people seem to hate Google. I don't understand why. They found a way to do something better that other people had been doing. That gave the a dominance in search. They played the capitalistic game and won
honorably, by providing a better service than any of it's competitors. Not by cheating, or stealing, damaging their competitors. This is bad?
But to Google's settlement and the story. In the US, it has become tradition to break legislative strangleholds through the courts. We ended our equivalent of apartheid via the courts. Abortion was legalized by the courts. Pornography laws were overturned by the courts. Busing of school children for forced integration was order by the courts. All of these had strong backing against changing these laws, and the courts overrode those constituencies.
Google is trying to do the same thing. A run around the current laws, instead of a frontal assault against them, by forcing a "use it or lose it" requirement into copyright (actually it's a lose control of it). They're doing it for profit, of course. How much profit they'll make I don't know. After all, most of the out-of-print works are out-of-print for a reason. How many people are going to buy The Mudhen? Or a 1943 mid-list novel? Will it be enough to pay for the scanning? <shrug> Google is already $125 million in the hole, before getting a dime in revenue. And that's not even including the scanning costs.
To my view, the main effect, whether deliberate or accidental, will be to disrupt the "stockpiling" stranglehold on copyrighted works. And that's a good thing, IMHO. Revising copyright would be far better, but that would take a frontal assault (billions and billions of dollars) against entrenched interests. Wiil it work? Who knows? It's at least an attack on the "add another 25 years forever" vested interest....