CNet reports on the looming battle between Google and book publishers, who are outraged that the search company intends to scan millions of books and make them available to search online.
Google's argument is that what they are doing is no different than indexing Web pages, which is basically a full text "scan." But there is a difference. Web pages are inherently public in nature, even if a copyright notice is attached to the pages. A person or company that creates a Web site wants the public to be able to access it (if they did not, they would password protect it).
But books are different. Web pages are provided for free, and books are offered for sale for a fee. By scanning them, Google subverts the relationship between publisher and reader. The author is also left out, since he or she gets paid royalties from publisher sales.
It is outrageous, but Google is taking advantage of a peculiarity of copyright law which says it is up to the copyright holder to enforce copyright. In other words, Google can do whatever it likes until challenged specifically, book by book. It is a nightmare for publishers and authors, who must try to force Google to take a book out of the company's computers. And there is no protection against bootleg copies downloaded from Google and then distributed outside of the Google system (e.g. using Napster or some other filesharing program).
Google, of course, also plans to put ads on every book page coughed up by its search engines, further subverting the system by baldly trying to make a buck off someone else's work--and not paying for the privilege.
Meanwhile, Google's core product, it's search engine, is less and less effective. While the company is busy trying to capture every kind of content on the Internet for ad placement, they have done little to make their search engine better. My current favorite? It is Dogpile, a dumb name but provides surprisingly good results.