bloomberg.com — As part of their fight over copyright lawsuits over their book-scanning product, Google plans to subpoena information from Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon.com. Google is seeking book lists, costs, estimated sales, dealings with publishers and possible benefit or harm to copyright owners. It is alleged their product exposes copyrighted book text.
Oct 6, 2006 View in Crawl 4
uptownOct 6, 2006Submitter
...oh yeah, I forgot to add "Breaking" or "Amazing" to the title.
entropymanOct 6, 2006
The publishers are pretty cynical, IMO. They want the works out there on Google and everywhere else. They just think they deserve a bigger cut from Google's advertising revenue in return for adding no value. It's all about new revenue streams, not piracy or author's rights (if it was, publishers would pay authors more in the first place).This sounds to me like Google's competitors cut better deals with the publishers that will likely show the publishers public claims are lies, that authors don't benefit, but the publishers make out quite nicely.
chrismmOct 7, 2006
Google wants books scanned for free to get more people coming to their pages in order to get more adwords exposure.Authors/Publishers are pissed because Google isn't buying the books.I dunno, it seems pretty clear cut. At least buy a copy of the book if you want to publish it to the world for free. Hell even libraries charge you a bit for your library card.
baldrOct 7, 2006
Google publishes the first few pages, not the entire book. amazon does the same thing. (unless the book is out of copyright)I don't know what libraries you go to, but I have never been charged for a card...
wackytOct 7, 2006
I wonder how Google would feel if someone copied their proprietary code and started a competing search engine? It's all in the public interest, right?