There is no defense, justification, or legal basis for Google being allowed to copy and redisplay pages (it erroneously calls it caching) from the entire web. It is flat out copyright infringement on a massive scale.

Google print is first year law school trivia – Google “caching” is stuff that should before the supreme court. Yet none of you so called copyright attorneys have raised so much as a whisper about it.

Where are you?

I am a junkie for your lectures (delivered via streaming video). I haven’t had one in a while, and it was great to get a fix.

One minor comment: there is a critical difference between the MP3.COM example and Google Book Search, which–with all due respect–I believe you neglected to mention.

In the case of MP3.COM BeamIt, the server delivers the *entire* content of a record album. However, for copyrighted work, Google Book Search never does this (unless explicitly permitted by the copyright owner) — only snippets are available. It is therefore easy to argue that MP3.COM violates fair use, whereas it is hard to argue that Google Book Search isn’t within fair use.

In regard to Ron’s question about how the creator could lose financially, you made the answer very clear in the video. Google is depriving the creator of the ability to exclusively sell ad’s on a Book Search system that the creator could set up. Yes, this is pretty far-fetched. But, it does seem that the representatives of the creators are attempting to push this argument.

Finally, I truly wonder whether the rank and file members of the AG and AAP really and truly want to stifle Google Book Search. It is often the case that professional organizations go off half-cocked and take on causes largely because it gives the organization something to do and justifies the existence of the highly-paid executives.

This is certainly the case in the biomedical research world where some of the most vociferous antagonists to open access publishing are non-profit professional societies, which are supposed to represent biomedical scientists. In fact, scientists benefit from open access publishing. It is only the high-paid bureacrats on the staffs of the professional societies that may have something to lose since the journal publishing enterprises might not be quite as profitable.

It seems that the answer lies in the DMCA “notice and takedown” provisions, which effectively put the onus on copyrightholders to tell ISP’s to take links to infringing works off their indexes. (Search engines have been characterized as ISPs).

But when I look at the statute, it appears to me that that is a very fragile safe harbor, full of all sorts of complications (as the Agence France Press v. Google case perhaps shows).

Anyone know of some good analysis on how strong that safe harbor is?

I have some questions about the fair use argument.

First: the definition of fair use is different from country to country. I guess in Hungary a fair use based defence wouldn’t stand simply because we have a list of what might be considered as fair use and what not.

Second: how can you tell if the market has failed (for good)? Sure you can say that it is inefficient at a given moment but what happens if the market finally comes up with a service: you take the previously granted fair use right away? In my opinion market changes too quickly to make that argument long standing – even if in this case this market change is slower than Google’s tempo.

Third: if market inefficiency is a good justification for fair use, why wouldn’t it stand for those goods in file sharing networks that are not on the market? Or to reduce even that: for those goods that are in copyright but orphan works? If Google wins the case should i bother with setting up an orphan works p2p network?

b.-