Law is an organic thing and this article offers a hopeful treatise on digitized libraries. In a free market the cost of things such as licenses are set between a willing buyer and a willing seller. So what if Google is currently the big boy on the street - who's to say Microsoft or other major players won't join the market once it is created - and whose to say publishers won't go after smaller licensees once the ball gets rolling?

This is a very informative article about Google's crap shoot at scanning just about every piece of literature known to humanity. It chronicles the many issues Google has to contend with--from sustaining without advertising, to copyright issues, to other roadblocks like reluctance of some publishers to cooperate.

You wonder about the "integrity" of books tranformed into digital media. Once digitized could passages be altered to fit some political or social agenda? You know, history rewritten? Still an ambitious project and a very good article to help people like me make sense of it. It's a little long but, I should read it again sometime.

Google follows in the footsteps of Project Gutenberg ( www.gutenberg.org/ ) in scanning out-of-copyright books that have long been out of print and generally unavailable. I wished that Jeffrey Toobin would have acknowledged the work of Project Gutenberg in this valuable task. So far as works in copyright, Toobin might have explored the concerns of authors and publishers in more depth so as to provide an inkling of what the eventual settlement of these lawsuits might look like. For a ... More »