Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
I'm not convinced that they have reliably honoured take down requests in the past.
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There is ample annecdotal evidence they don't.
Even if they did, their default opt-out approach has beeng rejected in court on this side of the pond along with the "orphan works" money grab by the Author's Guild "settlement" with Google that the judge threw out for lack of standing: the AG had no right to appoint themselves representatives of the wider class of authors, rather than the tiny part that is their membership.
IA can't claim even that.
As for the Google lawsuit, people keep misreading/misrepresenting the legal case itself. The actual legal issue being litigated was that Google, in order to provide book excerpt snippets in their search engine, created a database of scanned and indexed books. The AG position was that any use of the books other than individuals paying for the book was illegal.
After pruning away the irrelevancies and money grabs, the ruling was that inasmuch as Google's database was not distributing the scans and merely using it for internal purposes, to generate the excerpts (which are *explicitly* permitted under Fair Use legal doctrine) Google was not *distributing* anything that wasn't permitted by Fair Use.
That. Is. It.
The IA is taking the contents of *their* database and contributing entire books from it, pretending that if a <1% snippet is legal, so is 100% of the content. Disingenuos at best.
As pointed out above Fair Use is all about *limited* use. And distribution. And it applies to each individual item at issue.
There is nothing limited about the use the IA puts each copyrighted item to use. Even one user at a time, it is illegal to distribute the *entire* contents of the book without explicit permission.
The crime, as determined by the court, is the distribution, not tbe scanning.
Mass distribution = mass violation.
Everything else is just smoke and mirrors meant to obscure.