Google Book Project

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 1/3/07, Geoffrey S. Nathan <geoffnathan at wayne.edu> wrote:
> OK, I'm going to defend Google here.  Be aware that I'm wearing my IT
> Policy hat here, not my Linguist hat.  Google is (I believe) doing the
> world a favor by scanning these books.  But they are under extreme
> pressure to stop.  The pressure comes from some, but not all, parts of
> the publishing industry, which believes that if all books are digitized,
> no one will buy books any more, and artists will starve.  Or something.
> Anyway, you can read about it in any number of places (references
> supplied upon request--Pat Schroeder is the name of one of the major
> spokesmen for).
> So, Google is defending its project by, in part, arguing that having
> access to content through searches actually INCREASES sales of books,
> and is therefore not the moral equivalent of shoplifting (which
> Schroeder and others argue).

I appreciate the delicate balancing act that Google is trying to
perform, but what possible justification could they have to use the
godforsaken "snippet view" for, say, an 18th-century British journal
or a 20th-century US government document, both of which are obviously
in the public domain? I don't see how Google's overcautious approach
to public-domain documents serves anyone's interests, and I only hope
they ease up once their legal troubles begin to be resolved (or at
least begin to be more clearly delineated).


--Ben Zimmer

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