Google and Fair Use
If you buy a book, do you own that book or have you only rented the content in that book?
Under the current Copyright law, you may loan that book and share that book, but you may not copy the book and give those copies to your friends or sell those copies to your enemies.
The current Google project to digitize university libraries is a concern in that many of the works Google are scanning are still in the public domain. This is not only a violation of Copyright, but we believe it is also re-publication of a pre-existing, protected, work.
We are concerned how some university libraries are giving their books to Google to be scanned using the Fair Use doctrine as their excuse for not breaking the book's inherent Copyright.
That thinking stretches much too far the idea of Fair Use -- you can't copy and index and "serve" the contents of an entire book to the world and not infringe upon the original, incorruptible, Copyright.









2 comments:
That doesn't sound right to me. If you write it, you own it, and Google shouldn't get around your Copyright to make money and sell advertising.
Plus Google are doing this with the help of major universities in the name of "preservation" and equal access -- but this process still appears to violate the current Copyright law.
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