[Web4lib] Consumer Group Raises Concerns about Google Print Library

[Nicholas Finke]

On Oct 25, 2005, at 12:45 PM, Chuck0 wrote:

> NCL wrote:
>
>> "In a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary
>> subcommittees overseeing intellectual property issues, the nation's
>> oldest consumer advocacy group...warned...that the project, which  
>> will
>> resume scanning on November 1, 2005 poses dramatic threats to the
>> principle of copyrights; fairness to authors; and cultural  
>> selectivity,
>> exclusion, and censorship."
>>
>
> While I have plenty of reservations about a big corporation and its  
> plan to become "the Internet," I see anything that dissolves  
> intellectual property and moves our society to the eventual  
> abolition of IP as a good thing. The National Consumers League is  
> misguided and misinformed when it states that Google Print will  
> hurt consumers and authors. Projects like Google Print can only  
> help "consumers" by making available more intelelctual content  
> online, in the same way a big public library makes a wealth of  
> material availabe to the community.

What good does it do an author to have a wider exposure of his/her  
work if the work can be freely copied without any payment?  As I see  
it, the primary problem is not with the existence of intellectual  
property rights, in this case copyright, but with the ridiculously  
long term of protection.  In a world where practically instantaneous  
communication is possible and copying requires only a keystroke we  
have made copyright terms perpetual, at least in practice.  From  
being a modest protection so that authors can benefit from initial  
publication, copyright now lasts for over two lifetimes (author's  
life + 70 years).  Any reasonable incentive to create wouldn't have  
to be longer than 20 years or so.

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Nicholas D. Finke
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Wyoming, Ohio 45215
nfinke1 at cinci.rr.com
Tel: (513) 761-0744