In terms of non-commercial search engines, lets remember that both
yahoo and google came out of academic institutions. Google has been
setting up scanning deals with many libraries and aims to maximizes
their network centrality by establishing the structure of public
knowledge in a way which limits the possibility of future innovation
without going through google. For example in the next few years at the
university of California if you working on a NSF funded AI book
learning system or knowledge modeler using a large corps of books the
path of least resistance/only option will be a contract with google.
While troubling in the near term I don't foresee much of a problem in
the longterm because technological developments, legal challenges, and
maturing alternatives.
Technically given the rapid advancement of quality of cameras and
computer vision software etc..its foreseeable in the not so distant
future embedded devices (cellphones, what-have-you) will have ocr
capacities, and the problem then becomes getting enough volunteers. In
other words technological advancements will make participation in
projects like project
Gutenberg more accessible to the wiki/participatory masses.
Legally googles position may be challenged. The standard of copyright
is no longer "sweet of the brow" as established in Feist_v._Rural.
While google would argue transformative or expressive qualities, its
possible someone else could argue there is no expressive qualities or
that the expressive qualities (maybe googles meta-data system) can be
replaced with an alternative. Maybe something similar to the
"de-encapulating" public domain content argument we
presented to c-span a while back ;)
And finally the open
content alliance will benefit from technological advances and
increased funding as google's competitors recognize the need for shared
equal access to public knowledge. (note: open content alliance
contributors include Microsoft, Yahoo & the University of
California and pretty much everyone that is not google)
--michael
Richard Brady wrote:
Hi Mike
I'm not sure if I have such a problem with this. It must have cost
Google a fortune to scan the stuff in, so they deserve some
recognition. That, to me, justifies the "Digitized by Google" idea.
Exclusive rights for commerical use is also fair, but it should be for
a limited period, as discussed by Lessig in the book.
As for non-commerical use, I don't know how you define that in this
case. A non-commercial search engine is an interesting idea, but are
there any? How do they pay for all the hardware and bandwidth
required?
The important point to me here is that the contract does not preclude
rescanning of the books at a later time. So if someone else wants to
do the same thing later on, they can. But for now Google is paying, so
they get to decide what happens to the digital data.
I'm sounding very pro-Google right now, but I'm really not such a huge
fan. Just a realist. I'd much rather see a student driven project to
scan and make available all texts where the copyrights have lapsed or
permit copying.
Ciao,
Richard
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