A Posteriori

It’s a shame that the publishers’ association decided to make such a big deal out of Google scanning the content of public libraries. These numbskulls apparently don’t understand the meaning of fair use, nor do they appreciate the fundamental reason for libraries to exist in the first place.

Libraries exist in order or provide a repository of important knowledge for society as a whole, knowledge that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive for individuals to compile, especially low income individuals. The existence of libraries is fundamental to a free-thinking and well-informed society. Fortunately, such libraries also run contrary to the interests of large publishers, who would obviously make more money if everybody was forced to buy every single book they read. The internet serves the same purpose. As library books get scanned, the internet can become even more of a large electronic library than it already is. People might buy even less books

As for fair use, which is Google’s legal argument, the publishers don’t understand that it is implicit in copyright law that the public at large is allowed to use copyrighted material without permission for the purpose of critique, reference or summarization. This also runs contrary to the publishers’ business model, since it deprives them of the ability to charge people to make brief references to their material. Creating indexable references to these books is Google’s real agenda for scanning these books, and it does constitute fair use. Google’s legal case is rock-solid on this basis, and the publishers’ are wasting their shareholders’ money in filing this lawsuit.

With the law on Google’s side, it’s a shame that they managed to blackmail Yahoo! (with Wall Street’s complicity) into an opt-in system for library book scanning. An opt-in system (in which the publishers send the search engine the list of copyrighted books for which they grant scanning permission) is far less desirable for society as a whole than an opt-out system (in which the publishers send the search engine the list of copyrighted books for which they withdraw scanning permission).

It should not be Yahoo!’s or Google’s job to police and/or filter copyrighted content, nor should these companies or their users (directly or indirectly) have to pay for such content policing and/or filtering. If the publishes can’t get their own respective houses in order insofar as paying their own bloody costs of doing business and doing their own analysis as to what content if theirs is valuable enough to protect, then they don’t deserve to be in business at all. In the real world all kinds of businesses and corporations externalize their costs to all kinds of third parties and society as a whole. That doesn’t make such externalizing morally right, nor should society or other businesses willingly subject themselves to become victims of this externalization. Yahoo! (or their shareholders) chose to allow itself to be victimized in this manner.

I imagine in their fantasy world we would be forced to pay every single time we read either all or a part of their books, or use part of one of their books for reference, critique or summarization. Thankfully, physical libraries where low income people have access to a wealth of society’s knowledge still exist. We should not allow these publishers to take them away.