Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Sleight of hand: Watch Alex Macgillivray's hands carefully in this quote from a Wired News piece today. 'The world would be a much worse place if the card catalog in a library only contained the books that the publisher had come by and put in,' said Alex Macgillivray, an attorney at Google. Of course, that makes sense, you nod your head, how true, but then you realize that the analogy doesn't work. If card catalogs were as good at selling books as Google claims Google Print will be, they'd batch-submit all their publications using the marvel of computer technology (they know how to write scripts in NY too, or in a pinch, they can hire a wizard from California). No one has to 'come by' in the age of the Internet. How quaint. And misleading. It would be good to keep an eye on Dave Winer's hands too. Macgillivray doesn't say anything about helping sell books in the quote above. He just speaks about the importance of having the broadest possible index. The question under dispute is not whether a broad index is good for publishers, but whether creating a content index infringes copyright. The likely reason they insist on opt-out instead of giving an inch and letting it be opt-in -- very few publishers would opt-in, and at least some would forget to opt-out. More sleight of hand from Dave Winer. Claiming a "likely reason" without adducing any supporting evidence. Maybe the publishers want to operate their own search engine? After all, they did pay the authors advances on royalties, and marketed the books, they have a major investment in the books, and Google has no investment at all. Hands spinning frantically. Nobody stops the publishers from creating their search engines. But their "major investment" in the books (which, by the way, is minimal for many titles, especially technical titles where the authors do all the editing and typesetting work, and no advances are given) is irrelevant to the disputed issue, which is whether content indexing is fair use or not. Copyright is not property, it's a limited government-granted monopoly on some actions, which may or not include content indexing. Anyway, like any sleight of hand, the trick is to get you to focus on what's least relevant, and ignore what is most relevant. Exactly. 10:20:50 PM