Bill Blogs in C#

On Google print, intellectual property, and fairness

It’s time to start thinking about the actual activities, instead of simply believing that Google does no evil.

Yes, this is my blog entry about Google’s print activity and the lawsuits filed by several publishers and the author’s guild.

First, let me say that I’m all in favor of preserving information, and making it easier to find information. Let’s start with some examples. Anyone that has visited my house has commented on the large number of Grateful Dead tapes I’ve got. All are copies of concerts, made by friends and acquaintances, and traded with other folks. All were free. Ask any deadhead, and you can start your own collection. For you young folks that don’t remember tapes, you can now do the same with digital audio files: http://www.archive.org/audio/etreelisting-browse.php?cat=Grateful%20Dead

But, there are important points: The Grateful Dead had always allowed, and even encouraged this activity. If you bought tickets in the ‘tapers section’, that entitled you to bring taping equipment and create a copy of the show. The only restriction: you could not profit from the tapes you made. You could listen to them, you could trade them, you could distribute them any way you wanted, but you could not profit from them.

Next, let’s consider digitizing and preserving rare and at risk content. We developed and maintained an application for the University of Michigan graduate library (http://www.srtsolutions.com/PageTag/index.htm) that has been used to scan and store the rare books in the U of M Graduate library. This project enabled more people at U of M to work with these volumes. They are rare, old, and can be damaged by normal environmental conditions. Once again, the project was not for profit, and enabled researchers to access these rare volumes. Mickey Hart (yes, that’s another Grateful Dead reference) donated time, money, and expertise to work with the Smithsonian Institute to catalog and preserve early 20th century music. You can read a summary here: http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Music/9812/02/mickey.hart.wb

Finally, before I get to Google print, let’s discuss excerpts. Yes, this is the part where I respond to the obvious question about authors and publishers promoting their books. If you go to my Effective C# page you’ll see links to some selected pages that have been excerpted on the web. Key point: Exceprts. Not the entire book. None of the owners of these website (except Addison-Wesley) have the entire book content. They could not possibly re-publish the entire book.

Now let’s move on to the Google Print initiative. The first big difference: Google is a for-profit enterprise. No matter how you slice it, Google exists to make money. My first examples were non-profit activities: The Grateful Dead mandated that you could not profit from the tapes you made, or copied. The U of M Graduate library could give more students access to rare books by allowing people to view the images, rather than working in the environmental controlled stacks. The Smithsonian project preserved some early American music that otherwise would have been lost forever. Google will make money from Google print, and the only way I see that being possible is at the expense of publishers and authors.

Now, let’s look at my specific technical concerns. Google is currently saying that they will only provide small excerpts based on search terms. Ok script kiddies, here’s your challenge: Develop the set of queries that will return the entire 5 Harry Potter books, one page at a time. While I have better things to do with my time, I don’t doubt that it’s possible. If Google has the entire content, I’m sure the young hungry developer is out that that can create those scripts.

To finish this mild rant, let’s look at it from the other direction: I’d like the source code to everything Google develops. I promise that I will only excerpt a few functions as examples of ways to solve a given technical problem when a reader asks. I’m betting that Google won’t take me up on it.

So, I’m against it. Period. Google can scan excerpts of published works, but should not be allowed access to the full content.