Re: When you're buried in books

Possibly the most disingenuous argument I've read (in other articles on the topic) is that Google thinks they can do this under the "fair use" doctrine. Fair use allows copying of (usually small) portions of a copyrighted work for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. Copying the entire work is pretty much out of the question. Even if Google only intends to display small portions of the copyrighted works, the act prohibited is copying.

Fair use is pretty vague. It means different things to different people. For me, as a writer, fair use would be the freedom to quote from published works without having to count the words, or worry that I was exceeding some arbitrary limit tacitly agreed upon by some, but not all, publishers. The copyright laws as they stand severely restrict the use of copyrighted material in quotations in professional publications (as opposed to scholarly works).

The copyright laws are far too extensive. It was a good move to make copyright automatic, so that a writer didn't need to file for it. That was fair. But extending the term beyond around sixty years, maximum, was unwarranted, and was brought about by the desire of large corporations such as Disney to control certain works in perpetuity. As I writer, I'd be inclined to reduce the term of copyright. It used to be 28 years on first filing, and another 28 on renewal. I would do away with the need to file, and combine the two terms into a round 60 years -- if only for the same of clarity.

One of the big problems with the present copyright situation is that often nobody really knows when a work is copyrighted or in public domain. The works of H. P. Lovecraft are a case in point. Probably they are all in PD, but Arkham House still claims copyright in almost all of them.

As far as Google is concerned, I think their project to put books on-line in a manner that is fully searchable would be of extraordinary value to the entire human race, provided they don't just turn it into a pay per view service.
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Relevant Pages

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