Google vs. Publishers vs. Us

With all the talk of publishers suing Google this week, there are some who don’t actually get what the argument is about.
bq.Now they want to scan all the printed books and read them into its cache and let us find things in the books. Clearly for people who love information, this is a good thing. But the people who own the copyrights on the books think not. They think Google should get their permission before doing this, and if they don’t get the permission, they shouldn’t do the scanning, caching, and searching. Google almost agrees, but they say that the publishers have to opt-out of the program, instead of opting-in. They spin it so that the publishers sound dumb for not “getting” it, but if it’s really no big deal, why can’t Google flip it around and require an opt-in? – Dave Winer First off, the publishers can easily invoke the opt-out clause and I am sure most of them will. So, then, why are they so eager to launch a case against Google for something they aren’t even directly affected by? Because of their business model. Think about it for a moment: We have all been told for years that Microsoft isn’t competing against OpenOffice or WordPerfect or any other product these days when they launch a new version of Office; rather, they are competing against their own installed base. Why buy the latest version of Office if your current version does everything you want? I still use Office 2000 everyday and have no compelling interest in upgrading at all. Publishers have developed an unreasonable hatred of libraries over the years for much the same reason. Even though we are some of the main, and in many cases, only purchasers of their products, because of us, they have to compete with their own installed base. And they get even more upset when we lend books in ways they don’t like, or worse yet, lend items between libraries. Their problem isn’t that Google is acting like a business; their problem is that Google is acting like a library. If Google limited their service to books that had been opted-in, that would leave the question of works that had fallen out of copyright. It should be a simple question as to which books those are, but as Lawrence Lessig has shown in the past, it is not. And the publishers know this. This isn’t about protecting their content, it is crippling the service. And by forcing Google to research the copyright status of every single work they attempt to add to it, they would be making their best try at doing so. If Google loses this fight, we all lose. And when I say “we,” that included authors.