Google would have to give up most if not all of its available cash to secure copyrights to books, which probably explains why they have been scanning books and given publishers an opt-out choice that teeters on legal grounds....
Weekly Standard staff writer Jonathan V. Last said the task of pursuing all of the copyright holders would be a formidable one. Google probably won’t be able to avoid that if the courts find in favor of the search ad company’s enemies:
If the courts were to find against Google, however, the Book Search would likely die on the vine. As Georgetown’s Band notes, it would be extremely difficult to construct a licensing regime for books modeled on the ASCAP/BMI models for musical compositions. And if Google were to try to go legit, the transaction costs of identifying, locating, and contacting copyright holders to seek permission could easily stretch to tens of billions of dollars. Band puts the best guess in the neighborhood of $25 billion.
But it doesn't follow that Google has to seek permissions or that its opt-out policy isn't already "legit" --a question-begging term in both the WebProBlog title and the WS article. To figure out whether Google must seek permissions requires an inquiry into the law of fair use, not the economics of permission-seeking. If we had to pay for each breath, the cost would be prohibitive, but it doesn't follow that free breathing violates some obligation to pay.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/07/2007 10:55:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
