Brian Dear says that "Lessig is wrong" in a long post about the Google library case.
I don't care for much of the personal attacks against Lessig in that post, though I happen to disagree with Lessig as well on this particular question.
But Dear makes one interesting point I did not see as clearly before.
When scanning something, you first make a digital photography. That is one first copy. Then you use an optical character recognition program to automatically extract text from the photograph. That is a second copy.
Until now, I had just seen this process as one big "scanning" step, involving only one copy of the whole book.
Google then goes on and gives the library a third copy of the whole e-text.
So, while in the Arriba case we have only a graphically enhanced link to something that is on the Internet, Google makes THREE COPIES of the whole book.
They then of course serve the whole book (in many snippets) to their searchers, as I repeatedly have pointed out earlier.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at January 18, 2006 11:08 AM