I do not read mystery’s so have never bought a Roger Simon book. But perhaps if I had a free one on my laptop and idle time in an airport I might read it. If I liked it I might buy a sequel. The only people who really have anything to fear from making their material publicly available is those whose work does not warrant a second look.

What idea, that if you don’t like their position you’ll threaten them with identity theft?

Of interest is this statement:

Under the Print Library Project, Google plans to scan into its search database materials from the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford Universities, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. In response to search queries, users will be able to browse the full text of public domain materials, but only a few sentences of text around the search term in books still covered by copyright. This is a critical fact that bears repeating: for books still under copyright users will be able to see only a few sentences on either side of the search term. Users will not see a few pages, as under the Publisher Program, nor the full text, as for public domain works. Indeed, a full page of the book is never seen for an in-copyright book scanned as part of the Library Project unless a publisher decides to transfer their book into their Publisher Program account, in which case it would be under the agreement between Google and the copyright holder.

If this is the case, then some of the questions posed in the previous thread here have been answered.

Yes, I realize Google generates pages dynamically from data on thousands of servers. Better idea: Use the Google interface and all its trademarks. If Google fails to defend them, they will become public domain. Also, keep pages on all the top executives of Google, with photo, Google maps photos of their houses, directions to their houses, SSN, phone numbers, etc. They’ll get the idea and back off.

But how you gonna bell that cat, baby? Google doesn’t even have its OWN pages stored; they’re generated from teh query.

Um, as usual I’m not a lawyer, but I would think that it does. It’s well understood that reviewers have a fair-use right to excerpt a work; how does Google’s use differ from that? (You could easily make an argument that Google is effectively making an automated “review”.)

What’s more, let’s assume as a hypothetical that what Google does with these books were also applied to other copyrighted works, ie, web pages. (Under the terms of the Berne convention, they’re all works of authorship and under copyright from the moment of composition.) If Google can’t read in and index those works without an opt-in instead of an opt-out, the whole notion of search engines goes away.

I would think Google has an obligation to prevent someone from doing successive searches in a way to obtain the whole book, just as libraries have some obligation (and Kinkos even more) to prevent someone from making a photocopy of an entire book.

Um, as usual I’m not a lawyer, but I would think that it does. It’s well understood that reviewers have a fair-use right to excerpt a work; how does Google’s use differ from that? (You could easily make an argument that Google is effectively making an automated “review”.)

What’s more, let’s assume as a hypothetical that what Google does with these books were also applied to other copyrighted works, ie, web pages. (Under the terms of the Berne convention, they’re all works of authorship and under copyright from the moment of composition.) If Google can’t read in and index those works without an opt-in instead of an opt-out, the whole notion of search engines goes away.

I would think Google has an obligation to prevent someone from doing successive searches in a way to obtain the whole book, just as libraries have some obligation (and Kinkos even more) to prevent someone from making a photocopy of an entire book.