Re: Google books

["Dora Smith" <villandra@austin.rr.com>]

I'm afraid that, for once, I'm with Google on this one.   Information 
belongs to everyone and not only to those willing and able to pay big bucks 
for it.  I have scant use for copyright.  And the law is not as unfriendly 
to that concept as some would like to think.  Whatever issue it is that some 
people who aren't trying to sell knowledge and aren't fanatical followers of 
someone who is have with that.   I'm used to running into this on 
genealogical mailing lists that are often dominated by followers of one 
person trying to restrict all knowledge about an entire family group's 
history to people willing to pay her fifty or sixty dollars for it.   But 
the facts themselves are not copyrightable, and if the family is that 
popular, there are often much older genealogical sources whose copyright has 
expired or whose authors long ago made them publicly available for free. 
In academia, it gets far more ridiculous than that.   Scientific knowledge 
should not be restricted to people willing to pay $300 an article.   And 
that's my two cents!

So if you're waiting with teeth chomped for Google to get taken apart for 
making information so widely available, knock yourself out, we'll see.

Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, TX
tiggernut24@yahoo.com

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phillip Bigelow" <bigelowp@juno.com>
To: <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: Google books


> I saw a news story on this a week or so ago.  According to the story, 
> Google has a couple large buildings where there are nothing but banks and 
> banks of scanners.  They are scanning as many books, magazines and 
> whatever else is in print, as fast as they can.
>
> A Google rep. admitted that the ultimate goal is for Google to start 
> charging for this material, after they have "hooked" people.
>
> The news story also noted that Google will eventually get sued by someone 
> (or perhaps a class-action suit), because the copyright status of some of 
> this stuff is in question.
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