[IP] more on (Satire) Expanding the "Google Print" Concept to Other Media
Begin forwarded message:
From: Tim O'Reilly <tim@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 23, 2005 5:56:06 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] (Satire) Expanding the "Google Print" Concept to
Other Media
On Oct 23, 2005, at 9:05 AM, Lauren Weinstein wrote:
My latest "Reality Reset" column takes a satirical look at a way for
people to obtain vast amounts of free music and movies, by expanding
the "Google Print for Libraries" concept to these other usually
copyrighted media.
The column is titled:
"Free for All: The Google Excuse"
and is at:
http://www.vortex.com/reality/2005-10-23
Lauren's right that eventually there will be a search index for music
and movies as well as for books, and is that so bad? So far, online
search has been a boon, helping people to discover content,
increasing the value of the content that is found, rather than
devaluing it. Why should it be different for these media types?
Lauren is echoing the fear-mongering of the publishers. This is not
about making free content available to all. Google is very clear
that all they'll be providing is snippets, as they do in current
search engines, unless a book is out of copyright, or has been
explicitly opted in by the publisher. And the fact that Google
requires a full copy in order to create the index is consistent with
many other forms of technology. Every email or attachment you send
over a computer network is "copied" (and perhaps even backed up) on
many different computers, without your explicit knowledge and
consent. That's the way computers pass data around -- they make copies.
Regarding the debate about opt-out or opt-in, Google Print for
Libraries follows exactly the same approach to copyright as web
search engines. Web pages are also copyrighted material. Can you
imagine a world in which search engines had to ask web sites for
permission to copy and create an index of their content? As John
Battelle describes in his book, The Search, there were in fact web
page providers who made this argument in the early days of search
engines. But common sense prevailed, and the valuable search engine
world we take for granted today was born.
The publishers' position, that Google should ask them for permission,
rather than that copyright holders who don't want to be indexed
should opt out, is the only practical solution. Under the publisher
solution, the only works to be indexed will be those that the
publishers are currently pushing. And as Larry Lessig is fond of
pointing out, the works that are currently in print and supported by
publishers are only a small fraction of all the published works that
are still in copyright.
If the publisher position were to prevail, the millions of works that
are in those libraries might as well stay there, never to get on the
net. Publishers no longer care about them, in many cases no longer
even know whether they have rights to them.
On the other hand, if Google's position prevails, we have this
amazing discovery mechanism that will help us to rediscover lost
works, as well as to find works that are in print but are not
available in stores. That's why the NY Times titled my op-ed essay
on the subject "Search and Rescue." (http://radar.oreilly.com/
archives/2005/09/ny_times_op_ed_on_authors_guil.html )
We've done a study of how online access relates to print book sales
by comparing figures from Neilsen BookScan point of sale data for
print book sales with online access via our Safari Books Online
service, and what we've found confirms Chris Anderson's "Long Tail"
theory -- but with a couple of twists. First, there is a
disproportionate level of access online to books that are largely
unavailable in print -- 23% of Safari access comes from books that
represent only 6% of print sales; and second, and even more
interesting, the long tail shows a number of spikes -- much like a
Stegosaurus tail -- that shows where books that were "lost" in print
have been rediscovered online. (I'll be publishing more detailed
information on this study soon, and will send a note when it's
available, but I couldn't let Lauren's mis-information go by, even as
"satire.")
Much as is the case with the web, search engines for books will be an
amazing tool for users, authors, and publishers alike. Only the
short sighted and the greedy (and greed is definitely a factor --
people seeing that google has figured out how to create value from
something they've effectively thrown away, and are now suing because
they want to recapture some of that value) are banging the drum about
the dangers of this program.
_________________________________________
Tim O'Reilly, Founder & CEO, O'Reilly Media,
1005 Gravenstein Highway N., Sebastopol, CA 95472
+1-707-827-7150 http://tim.oreilly.com
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