An introduction to Google Books...

This is the first of what will probably be many posts about Google.

I (like many people) have been fascinated with Google for quite some time. I even did a report on them (Google Books) in one of my engineering classes on intellectual property.

The Google Books project is a project where Google has teamed up with many libraries across the world and begun scanning all of the books they have available. Once scanned, these books are OCR'ed and become text, which we all know is searchable. Google then indexes these books and allows people all over the world to search them.

Sounds great! What could possibly be bad about this??

Well, Google got greedy.

While Google started scanning books, some authors decided that they didn't want their books to be searchable. And, seeing as how the contents of the books were the intellectual property of the authors, this was certainly their right to keep from having their books searchable via the internet. So, Google created an "opt-out" program whereby authors would be able to opt-out of the Google Book project.

(Here's where it gets interesting)...

Even if the authors had opted out, the books were still scanned and archived. Why? -- Who knows, but I bet you have a pretty good guess.

But wait, that's not right. You can't just walk into a library and photocopy an entire book. Just like you can't borrow a CD or movie and go home and copy it. That's illegal. The library paid a higher license fee than an individual user so that they could lend the intellectual property to others, but they didn't pay to "resell" the content for nothing. And, when you check out a book, CD, or video from the library, you don't have the rights to copy that media.

So, while the authors argue that it is their right to have Google not scan their book at all, Google maintains that the author only has rights to keep the information off the internet.

So, how did Google Books get away with it?
You tell me.