Don't share books?

[doobit]

Someone (I can't find the original document) once wrote that we will soon be sued for sharing books with others.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20070306/D8NME16O0.html

[Hendrixski]

Shouldn't those companies worry about upgrading their obsolete business model to be competitive rather than worry about suing Google?

The Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild should also sue Random House publishers, which also has a program through which you can browse books, the same way that Google is planning to do it. The Random House interface is really clunky though, One thing that's cool though is that you can copy some code onto your mySpace page, or if you have a real website, to display your favorite passages from certain books.

I assume Google can do better than that.

[tragicglee]

"Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people's content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue," wrote Thomas C. Rubin, an associate general counsel at Microsoft, in the speech he planned to give at the annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers in New York.

It blows my mind that anyone at Microsoft has the audacity to talk about companies making money solely on the backs of other people's content. They BOUGHT the beginnings of their OS, and in recent years, have added features and functionality from other OSes to it. IE started from Mosaic, and though I've only *looked* at IE7 briefly, it reminds me an awful lot of Opera and Firefox. I seem to recall AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserv existing long before MSN, and ICQ and AIM long before Windows Messenger, Soapbox (or whatever it is) long after MySpace and Facebook. I seem to recall the Zune coming after the iPod, the XBOX coming after a plethora of other consoles, their satellite map coming after Google Earth, and on and on and on. I'm also positive that if I hated myself enough to use Microsoft's search engine, I'd find a smattering of text ads. They're not trailblazers, they are not innovaters! They are where they are, today, courtesy of dumb luck and brute force. Arrrgh. Every now and then, I forget what I have against MS. Now I want to nuke my XP partition. But ooh, extended desktop is so sweet. But oooh, stupid, stupid, evil! It's cute that MS feels so threatend, though.

I believe that knowledge is power, that information should be allowed to flow Freely because it benefits us all. I have no problem with Google's method, and hope to see them win this case - this is not because I expect free books in their entirity (I don't, and I doubt anyone with a love of reading, and the ability to purchase books has a problem paying for something tangible when given the choice between that and trying to read on a monitor, or shelling out more than the book's cost in ink & paper to print!) but because I believe the copyright system is inherrently flawed and only serves to benefit the corporations, rather than to protect the authors. Also, it would make finding books to buy much easier for me if I could flip through a few pages and get a feel for a certain book (I know I can do that on Amazon and some other sites, but I stopped around the time they started requiring an account because that's creepy. I know search engines can/do track to, but *shrug*).

Anyway, it's not like they run the risk of mass amounts of cash to... literary pirates. I can't imagine a guy approaching people on the street, saying "Fiction! Non-fiction! Fantasy! Biology! Biography! Self-help! Sci-fi! Chick Lit! I got what you need" and trying to sell ebook CD/DvDs, or print outs. And its not like there's going to be a rash of teens & young adults going "Duuuuude, I just got a new 500 gig drive. I'm gonna take *insert publisher here* for everything they've got".

[Hendrixski]

And its not like there's going to be a rash of teens & young adults going "Duuuuude, I just got a new 500 gig drive. I'm gonna take *insert publisher here* for everything they've got".

Dude, I'm like totally going to pirate all the books I can get, man. Because that would be totally awesome.

Just Kidding.

I would like to be able to use Google as a library of book content as well as internet content. I just hope they won't cripple it with excessive DRM.

[Tomosaur]

Someone (I can't find the original document) once wrote that we will soon be sued for sharing books with others.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20070306/D8NME16O0.html

As far as I'm aware - this has pretty much always been the case. 90% of the law is property, and 70% of that is completely unenforcible. There's no way anyone is going to sue you for sharing a book:

1) Sharing a book implies that only one of you has access to the book at any one time. This is perfectly acceptable - and any company which tells you otherwise doesn't know the law very well. As long as copies aren't made, sharing is fine.

2) How exactly would they plan on catching anybody?