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Originally Posted by rmeister0
Except: #1, they aren't respecting the wishes of the copyright holders, because they are asking Google NOT to do this.
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From what I understand, copyright holders (which, interestingly, is not nearly the same list as "authors") are saying "don't do this project" and "don't put our books in this project" as opposed to what Google asked which is "send us a list of works that you don't want in our project."
What I hear from the copyright holders is "We won't produce a list because we don't want it to be generally known how many works of dead authors are not in the public domain, or how many works are in danger of being lost because we don't remember that we own the copyright to them, or how many works we AREN'T publishing."
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Originally Posted by rmeister0
1. Google could have avoided a lot of this problem if it had gone to the major publisher's first and pitched their case. Instead, they are asking for forgiveness instead after pissing off a bunch of large corporate interests. Regardless of how anyone feels about it, that is not the smart way to do it.
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On the contrary, this would have brought everything to court much sooner - before anything got started. We already know what the publishers would have said: "No!"
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Originally Posted by rmeister0
2. Going with an "opt-out" option only made the situation worse, because it is asking the copyright holders to take action to prevent something they don't want happening from happening. That's not how copyright law works.
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Seeing how those same copyright holders made the finding of the owner of a particular work nearly impossible (or prohibitively expensive), an "opt out" option was the only way.
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Originally Posted by rmeister0
Frankly I'm getting tired of the automatic "Google good, publishers bad" knee-jerk reactions I'm seeing on this.
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Publishers aren't "bad". They are simply becomming less and less relevant. To combat that, they are bribing our "representatives" in gov't to effectively legislate their business model. I don't see this as "bad" any more than I see the actions of a dying animal as "bad". I understand why they are doing this, but I don't have to like it.