Folks following Google’s ambitious book-scanning project might want to check out First Monday’s interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan, a strong critic of the “Googlization” of libraries and copyright law. (The interview is available as a podcast and as a written transcript.)
Mr. Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, argues that Google’s library-scanning project could cause a copyright catastrophe by casting doubt on fair-use doctrine. Fair use is typically threshed out on a case-by-case basis, the scholar says, but Google is asking courts to issue broad rulings on the doctrine: But to lay this huge experiment, this many millions of books on a rather rickety and unpredictable system like fair use, is actually very unfair to fair use. And what I¹m afraid of is that Google will certainly lose in court, and what will happen is courts will generate an indelicate view of fair use, a highly restricted view of fair use and will ultimately reign in a lot of future experiments.
Of course, plenty of college libraries have already signed on with Google’s digitization project, and more institutions will certainly follow suit. Should colleges be taking a more circumspect approach to Google Book Search? —Brock Read
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