Skeptical overview of Google's campaign to digitize the world's books:
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/431afruv.asp
Excerpt:
"Copyright has its foundations in English law and the Licensing Act
of 1662. The falling costs of printing had created rampant book piracy
in England. Concerned that such behavior would blunt creativity and
harm the book business, Charles II established a register of licensed
books to protect authors and publishers. A hundred years later, the
copyright was the only right the Founding Fathers gauged important
enough to recognize explicitly in the Constitution itself. In the
intervening years, it has evolved somewhat. Today, works published
before 1923 are generally in the public domain. There are exceptions
and complexities, but works published after 1978 are protected by
copyright for 70 years from the author's death. As for works published
between 1923 and 1978, they were given an original copyright protection
of 28 years from first publication and another 67 years of protection
upon renewal of the copyright. Got that?
And here lies Google's dilemma: Out-of-copyright books account for
about one-sixth of all titles. Most books--75 percent of them--are in
copyright, but out of print. Only about 10 percent of all books are
both copyrighted and in print. Google has decided to get around
this problem of copyright protection by simply ignoring it: forging
ahead and scanning books, regardless of their copyright status. If a
book is in the public domain, its full text is displayed to users, but
if the book is protected, then Google shows users only a "snippet" of
the text surrounding the search result. It is relevant to note that
"snippet" is Google's word and is intentionally not a legal term; how
much text is displayed is entirely at Google's discretion."
Excerpt:
"Google's corporate philosophy is based on the model which brought them success: organizing and giving away other people's content, creating space for advertisements in the process. The enormous success Google found with that model in the search engine business spurred it to try and impose it in every arena. In the Google worldview, content is individually valueless. No one page is more important than the next; the value lies in the page view.
And a page view is a page view, regardless of whether the page in question has a picture of a cat, a single link to another site, or the full text of Freakonomics. When all you're selling is ad space, the value shifts from the content to the viewer. And ultimately the content is valued at nothing. And here, finally, is the larger problem posed by Google's actions.
Books are not in any important sense user-centric. Whether or not a book has readers matters little. Books stand on their own, over time, as ideas and creations. In the world of books, it is the ideas and the authors that matter most, not the readers. That is why the copyright exists in the first
place, to protect the value of these created works, a value which Google is trying mightily to deny.
As much as any other American business, Google is the corporate embodiment of the Internet's first principles. And as with so much else on the Internet, the promise of Google Book Search lies somewhere off on the horizon, while the dangers it poses today are very real."