Listics

(Bravo to Dr. W. for pointing to the brief Lessig post in Wired…)

Lessig’s comments on the Authors Guild brouhaha around Google Print and copyright are of the "let’s you and him fight" variety and to be expected from a lawyer trained in the adversarial arts. Certainly if Google was a mom and pop scannery making indexed versions of print publications available under fair use provisions of the copyright law, the Authors Guild would not have seen value in a lawsuit (though arguably they may have chilled mom and pop right out of business with the threat).  Lessig would like to see Google defend their right to scan printed matter and make indexed information of copyrighted textual work available within the fair use guidelines of American copyright law.  He seems to be afraid that they will reach a settlement with their antagonists and that the matter will be resolved without the ritual opening of purses to the Knights of the bar.

I want Google’s work to continue more than I care about the legal jousting.  Google’s project has been underway for about two years.  They have a program for publishers, a program that should protect the rights of authors.  Google is "partnering" with four universities and the New York Public Library to digitize a lot of books.  If it was strictly a cash and carry contractual relationship, a project with libraries paying a scanning and indexing company a fee for service, then the complexities of fear associated with the newly risen corporate monolith of Search would be easily dismissed.  But since Google is a full partner whose shareholders have interests in some ways orthogonal to the libraries users’ interests, the matter is more complicated than Larry Lessig allows.

(Disclosure:  I’m a bit of a socialist with a desire to draw a bright line between private commerce and public concerns.  Schools, libraries, and access to information on the net are public concerns.)