Wow, what a shocker - one of the trolls who's ethics were low enough to let him work for the RIAA doesn't like Google book search either. Next, you'll tell me that night follows day. Here's his argument:

In Google's case, they are clearly scanning in the original copyrighted pages of these books, no doubt using fairly high resolution digital photography, and then it seems they are using some sort of optical character recognition to transform the printed text on the page into a digital text on the computer. On Google's computer. I have no idea if Google is OCRing and then running an indexer on the resulting body of text and then tossing the body of text and keeping the index. I bet they're not. I bet they're keeping the whole enchilada. I mean, look at what Google's doing. Or must be doing: how would Google know where the words "Pioneer Life" appear in a bitmap image of the scanned book, unless they had scanned the book's entirety, kept all the bitmap images, and recorded where the printed words in the image match up to the text words in the digitized OCR'd body of text? That's got to be some pretty fancy technology to do that.

I love the way he says "fancy technology, as if that's enough to indict them right there. His point is that this technology doesn't make a lower quality copy, it makes a good one - and that the quality of the reproduction violates fair use. Never mind that they aren't:

• Listing entire books online
• Selling access to books online

What they are doing is improving search, making it more likely that I'll find a reference to a work that I didn't know existed - and that I could then go and *gasp* buy that book.

Which is where I think the real issue is for publishers - it's the same one that music publishers have with iTunes. They are being disintermediated, and they don't like it. They want to tell me which works exist on a given topic - under no circumstances do they want me finding that information out myself. Heck, if I do, I might find an older work, or a self published work - or anything that isn't going for the high margin they want to push. This has nothing to do with protecting the rights of authors, any more than the RIAA is out to protect the rights of artists. Quite the contrary - it's about protecting the rights of the established middlemen who enjoy skimming their percentage of the price.

Throughout history, new technology has supplanted older technology, and the incumbents have never been happy about it. The publishers and the RIAA are like the Luddites of old, but with bigger lawyers.