Alan vs. Allan

This afternoon, the Progress and Freedom Foundation hosted a panel discussion about Google’s Library Project, the search company’s effort to scan millions of books from a handful of top research libraries. Alan Davidson, a lawyer for Google, was present to talk about what he saw as the altruistic motivations of the Library Project. Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs for the Association of American Publishers, which recently coordinated a lawsuit against Google over the project, sat on the other side of the table to deliver sharp retorts to Mr. Davidson’s points.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Davidson often played up the commercial benefit of the Library Project to publishers—the fact that readers in the world may end up using the service to find and buy books that they never knew existed. He also stressed that the displays of the searched books still under copyright show only "snippets" of books, not even entire passages. He also stressed that Google took a "conservative" view of copyright law—although the publishers have alleged otherwise—and that Google’s use of the snippets, and the books they come from, falls under the fair-use doctrine of the law. 

Allan Adler said that Google was a "one-trick pony," albeit with a pretty cool trick – gathering and organizing the world’s information. But even with that mission, one needs limits—for privacy, for security, and for the "pillar" of the publishing business model, intellectual property. In unbundling and distributing the content of books in print and out, he said, "we should consider who published those books in the first place." Mr. Adler implied that Google bullied its way into the Library Project, telling publishers how it was going to be. Google also has no right to give digitized copies of the books to its partner libraries, said Mr. Adler, as the company has agreed to do.