[IP] more on An author's dissent on Google Print
Begin forwarded message:
From: Brad Templeton <btm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 29, 2005 11:01:22 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: lauren@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] more on An author's dissent on Google Print
On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 08:17:11PM -0400, David Farber wrote:
If I suggest that a service that's so great should have no problem
operating on an opt-in rather than opt-out basis, these folks clam
up suddenly. They know damned well that a lot of people -- perhaps
most people -- won't be interested in participating and would not
opt-in, so conscription becomes the order of the day.
It appears likely that some of the same reasoning is behind Google
Print for Libraries in significant respects.
Indeed, the debate is entirely about what the default should be.
But it's not as simple as you suggest. Google, is, as far as I
know, removing works for authors and publishers who opt out, so
the only question is what should be the state for works where the
author/publisher doesn't know to opt out, or finds it too hard to
do so.
I think it's not that they fear that many would not want to
participate. I actually suspect most would. Tons of stuff with
commercial value is up on the web, and the web has contained an
opt-out system for spiders (robots.txt) since the very beginning,
and the truth is that very few opt out or seek to opt out. In fact,
the reverse, there is a giant industry around how to opt in even
more to being spidered and searched. Though this is on stuff
you already decided to offer to the public of course.
I suspect most authors, given the choice of being in the index
or not being in it, and just those two choices, would prefer to be
in it. It seems to me the main reasoning behind not being in it
is to generate a third choice -- to be in it, but to be paid when
searches pop up fragments of one's book.
However, as to what the default should be, the reality is that
a default of having to opt-in won't generate a very useful index,
because of the vast number of orphaned works that are still technically
under copyright, but which have practically been abanonded by their
authors, or for whom finding the copyright holders is an intractable
problem. Many solutions have been debated for the orphan problem,
but none is yet in place. Google is trying to push one particular
solution. Since major publishers can pretty readily opt out their
catalogs, the only real issue for Google, I suspect, is that vast long
tail of books not at major publishers.
It's pretty obvious that if web searching had been opt-in (ie. you
don't get spidered unless you put in an affirmative robots.txt instead
of the reverse) it would not have developed anywhere at all in the style
and pace that it did.
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