Google v Authors Guild: a victory for readers' right to choose

A Manhattan court case about digitisation rights has brought books and the web a step closer togetherOn 14 November, after eight years of wrangling, Judge Denny Chin of the Manhattan district court finally ruled in the case of Google versus the Authors Guild. At issue was Google's scanning and digitisation of more than 20m books from libraries across the world, but at the heart of the case was question of what constitutes fair use in the age of the internet.For the Authors Guild, it was unquestioningly a violation of publishers' and authors' rights to copy their work wholesale and make "snippets" of it available online. For Google, and for many scholars and librarians who petitioned on its behalf, the indexing of those works is transformative, and adds to, rather than reduces, their value. After much deliberation, the courts have come to agree with the latter – it is, after all, what search engines have been doing to the web since it originated.There is a point at which we come to assume that a text is first and foremost digital. We've already passed that point for much of the media around us, understanding that even the letters we receive in the post are printed from digital "originals". Newspapers currently inhabit a mid-point: we're still unsure whether the printed or the website edition is the "true" version.That point is fast approaching for the book, and we are choosing the form that it will take. Essentially, the book is becoming more like the web, opened up to... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2013-11-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with: #search engines #fast approaching #long term

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