On Google Books, also re Lawrence's comments

Thank you, Lawrence, for your insightful analysis and comparison between the website search engine and book search engine. Here, I have some ideas to share with you regarding your comparison and question.

First of all, I have an article which demonstrates the whole process of how search engine works for you: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/search-engine.htm. As describing in this article, the scrawling software called “spider” scrawls millions of web pages in a very efficient way, which means a search engine's spiders have to look at a lot of pages just like people read books. But “reading” alone doesn’t mean the spider is scanning every page that it has crawled and copying them into its database. In fact, what the spider has done is just taking some key content which later is used to build an index to match the words that users entered. It’s just like a person takes some notes when he/she is reading a book. So it's absolutely different from the process that scanning every single page of books and store them in a separate database. In this case however, what Google Books done is digitalizing the content of books, which is the exact meaning of “copy” defined by copyright law.

I think the main opponent to Google Books are not authors, but the publishers. Digitalizing books doesn’t largely impact the interest of authors, who won’t care too much about how his books is presented to readers, but rather the publishers. It means people may read books through the computer and Internet, skipping the publisher who was traditionally the biggest winner in content market. Therefore, they become the main opponent of digitalizing books since Google Books is grabbing their market and profits. What’s more, Google Books is partly infringing the right of publishers when they scan books already have been published. This is a very important component in copyright system, which is also called neighboring rights in civil countries.

From the policy consideration, however, high technology, especially when it substantially promotes the progress of art and social wealth, has being consistently supported by congress and judicial branch. Technology development is an irresistible trend and inevitably brings a lot of challenge to copyright law, virtually to the traditional interest structure of the content market. In my opinion, we can not simply resist the new tech and the big change it brings, but think about how to reasonably allocate the interest in the new market. Of course, this should be largely accomplished by different application of copyright law. Thus when it comes to Google Books, I think the main practical issues is how to justify the copying of books in legal context and compensate publishers in a technical way.