Google and Copyright

Salon has an essay about Google and the copyright brouhaha. The article is interesting as are the letters about it. I can see both sides of the argument, but I lean a little toward letting Google proceed for the following reasons: it is fundamentally no different than letting libraries exist, authors can seldom make money for very long periods on their books as the used book market is very lively, and perhaps sales of older, unpublicized books will be generated. One letter writer suggested counting the times a book was accessed thereby encouraging publishers to reprint (though I could see how the results could be skewed). Another writer opposed to the idea cited the similarity to the huge lawsuits Kinko had when they copied sections of text for university students.

One of the main arguments seems to center on how rich Google is and how they should share with the authors. Yes they are rich but how much of their money comes from their ads and how much comes from stock market speculation? Google claims they will not make any money from the books. As a citizen of a remote, mostly fundamentalist town, I would love access to a large university library for free.