Some of the people defending Google's right to extend their spam and spyware business to twenty million books without bothering to ask the authors base that defense on what the author should reasonably do if asked.
This line of reasoning can be found for example in a post by Jack Balkin about a week ago:
Every author wishes that more people read his or her books. Most of us would happily stand on street corners with sandwich boards if we thought it would help. Anything that brings our work in front of a larger public should be welcomed as a good thing, not something to be feared. The Authors Guild, and indeed all authors, should be working with search engines like Google to come up with new and creative ways to get people to know about and sample what we have often spent many months-- and sometimes many years-- working on. Authors spend their lives putting the best part of themselves into their books. The cruelest fate they can suffer is not criticism and rejection-- it is being forgotten. The digitally networked environment gives them a chance to avoid that fate. All authors who care about their work should embrace it.
Similar rhetoric comes from Xeni Jardin, who adds some language insulting authors as "saps" and Cory Doctorow.
One could answer this by pointing out good reasons why an author would not want to be included in the index without compensation. See for example this statement from the publisher Penn State Press, where they point out that Google is using one unauthorized copy of their whole books in the index and ANOTHER unauthorized copy as payment for the university library that is supplying the books to them. Clearly the dollar value of that payment should flow to the copyright holders. It does not.
I could add as an author that I don't happen to want some Viagra ad I have no control over to pop up next to search results including my books. I also object specifically to contributing anything to Google's spam and spyware empire, while I don't have a problem with giving Yahoo the rights to a similar reasonable project.
That however is not really the point I want to make here.
The point is that in a discussion about the limits of fair use no one has any business second-guessing the author's choice.
Those who don't want to object to being included in Google's project certainly can easily have that happen. They can either use a license that permits indexing for profit (a non-commercial Creative Commons license probably would be not clear enough on the point) or just sit back and quietly congratulate Google on their good sense in not bothering to ask.
But that choice is up to every author only for his own works. If Doctorow and Balkin want their books indexed by Google, of course they will get them indexed.
They have however no business to try imposing their choice on other authors. Current copyright gives the right to choose on how, if at all, a work is published to the copyright holder and not to any third parties. The copyright holder does not need any reasons, much less convincing reasons, for deciding to withhold a license.
And while I am at it, the new project by Yahoo and the Internet Archive shows that, of course, you can start online indexing of books without violating the orphans.
And another quick link: Publishers are starting to pull out of the "Google Publisher" program because they don't like the "Google Library" part.
Update October 11: More of the same from Cory Doctorow, printing some paragraphs of a Wall Street Journal editorial at BoingBoing.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at October 8, 2005 12:13 PM