Why Google Will Probably Prevail
Google Print (application/pdf Object)
Despite the attempt by the Authors Guild to cut the noses off of their authors to spite their faces, according to this analysis Google will probably prevail with a fair-use defense, assuming that the court follows the holding in Kelly v. Arriba Soft. There was a point when I would have been surprised at the various authors who are up in arms over Google adding their works to what amounts to a gigantic online card-catalog (if the authors and publishers don’t specifically license Google to display more, the search results only return a few sentences on either side of the search term, and the search term will only return three hits per work so you can’t stitch together a complete copy of the work by searching for common terms such as “a” or “the”). Then I learned that when it comes to intellectual property law, most authors that I’ve talked to about this are cranks who in their heart of hearts still resent the fact that public libraries are allowed to exist.
Thursday, September 22nd, 2005