It was a busy week on the copyright front this week, as several book publishers drew a line in the sand over Google's efforts to scan a large number of books to improve their search offering -- and for whatever other purpose Google decides to put it to.
Eric Schmidt ran an "advertorial" in the Wall Street Journal explaining their position and making very bold claims about how what they're doing is in the public interest and completely covered by "fair use." Funny, though, how he defines fair use completely in terms of Google's customers' activities, and not Google's... even though Google is the one scanning and digitizing the books, will be serving up ads, will be tracking all sorts of usage data about the people who access that data, will probably take a cut of any book sales that ensue from people searching for a particular book, and will use the data internally to improve their own search technologies. Google profits in a big way from this, which is not something contemplated at all by "fair use" in the letter of the law and has explicitly been ruled against in case law. But Google doesn't think they need explicit permission from copyright holders to profit from their work. Do no evil? You be the judge. (yeah, I have a pretty transparent opinion of this)
John Battelle, a pundit who follows the search business closely, has revised his opinion a bit on this, after talking to the publishers. More interesting, though, is Nicholas Carr's thoughts. Carr is the (in)famous author of the Harvard Business Review paper "IT Doesn't Matter" and while I generally disagree with a lot of stuff that he says, in this case I agree with both Carr and Battelle that this is shaping up to be a defining test case for fair use in copyright law.
10:53:01 AM 
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