Google, Library Scanning, and Copyright

There’s a nice (and brief) roundup of issues concerning Google’s massive library book scanning project at Ars Technica this morning. I’d like to comment on it more fully, but I don’t have the time or patience to read through all the relevant copyright law. My illustrious employer is also a member of this project, so I expect to be hearing a lot about this topic in the coming years.

The gist of the problem appears to be that copyright pertaining to electronic media has not been fully hashed out in the courts, so several opinions can be regarded as having validity. The idea of Google, a powerful media corporation, having control over copies of many millions of pages of copyrighted content is mind-boggling. What do they say they intend to do with them? Their use could be either lawful, unlawful, or exist in a legal limbo.

Several amusing remarks are made in the back-and-forth comments between Paul Courant and Siva Vaidhyanathan about the general laziness of modern students, to the effect that they won’t bother to physically seek out actual books, but prefer electronic versions…a generalization, but one with some truth to it. It’s just the way they was raised, I guess.