[Corpora-List] Google Books, copyrights, and corpora

[Mark P. Line]

Jean-Phi wrote:
> I'm not a legal expert, but if Google loses the case and is prevented
> from displaying, for free, a snippet of a few sentences from a
> copyrighted book, then I wonder about the consequences on things like
> simply citing a book's paragraph: what's the difference between a
> Google's snippet, and the paragraph I cite in my paper, in my book, on
> on my web site, to refer truthfully to the original author's words?

Presumably, the difference would be that the court will have found that
Google's snippets could be pasted back together by the user so as to
reconstruct significant portions of the copyrighted work, and that that
was not fair use. Clearly, no such claim could be made about a single
cited paragraphs in an academic work.


> Will I be expected to pay copyright fees for every citation?

If case law happened to move in that direction, you might be expected to
pay royalties for any use -- regardless of how the Google thing goes down.
I'd be surprised if it did, though, since I don't see any signs that
they're going to wax that draconian even with recorded music.


IANAL. TINLA.

-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX