[...] I know it hasn’t been that long since I took a few roundhouse swings at Andrew Keen, the sometime entrepreneur and “social critic,” who wrote about the Google-YouTube deal and how it was like two thieves uniting. But I just came across a post promoting his new book, entitled “The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking, and the Digital World are Assaulting our Economy, Culture and Values,” and it just sounds so mind-bogglingly stupid I couldn’t help myself. This makes Nicholas Carr sound sane. [...]

You write: Let’s review: Google News posts snippets of text, which is permitted by fair use principles — just as it does for the Google Print project — and doesn’t display advertising on its pages. How is that “a form of theft” or “blatant disregard” for intellectual property?

Do you want a serious answer to this question? Or are you being rhetorical? If the latter, then never mind. But if the former, then consider the following: In order for Google to serve out snippets of text to millions of users in its Print project, it has to copy, and indefinitely retain, a book in its entirety.

If that is not a violation of copyright, I don’t know what is. Suppose for example that everyone behaved the way Google did.. and made and indefinitely retained copies of books, CDs, movies, etc. Especially after not having paid for them in the first place (i.e. grabbing them for free from the library).

Do you honestly not see a problem with that behavior? Or do you see that there might actually be more than one valid point to be made here.. that despite the evil, anti-user policies of the RIAA and MPAA, the solution is not to go and grab and keep whatever you want.

I’m not on the side of the RIAA et al. But I still think it is true that Google and YouTube are not great respectors of copyright.

Thanks for the comment, JG. I realize that copying in the way Google does is considered an infringement of copyright, but does that really make any sense? I’m not just trying to weasel out of your question. I’m really interested in the answer.

Obviously, if everyone did what Google does — paying people millions of dollars to scan in millions of books, or digitizing and storing millions of hours of video — then that would be wrong. But the fact is that doing so is impractical (bordering on impossible) for anyone but Google, and in any case the copying is only done so that snippets can be served up. No other use is made of it.

Your argument could just as easily be used to make the case that Google’s search engine engages in wholesale copyright infringement, since it effectively copies every Web page it crawls in order to serve up search results.

So I guess the short answer is no, I don’t see any problem with that behaviour.

Grr. I had a fairly coherent, exemplar-filled response composed, and then Firefox crashed. I’m not typing all that in again. Web 2.0 really needs to address the whole “saved work” problem.

Anyway, the jist of my argument boils down to these points:

(1) Whether or not something violates copyright law is a separate issue from whether it makes sense.

(2) I agree with you that forbidding Google from wrapping search around media content does not make sense.

(3) However, that still does not give Google a right to take the law into its own hands, and do whatever it wants around grabbing copyrighted content, just because the end application makes sense.

Even if the “ends” are valid, that does not give Google the right to apply whatever “means” it wants toward achieving those ends.

There are a lot of laws out there that really do not make sense. But we as a society have a mechanism for changing those laws. Let Google pay its high-powered lobbying firms in Washington to work toward a positive change, but the moment Google takes the law into its own hands, it sets that precedent for everyone else.. and that is a real problem. If Andrew Keen totally misses the point, by focusing on fraudulent business models when the real issue is the goodness of search-based content discovery, I think the rest of the blogosphere totally misses the point that we are a society governed by rule of law, and until laws actually change, behaving outside the law is not a socially healthy way to get things done.

(And one final sub-argument, in regards to impracticality: The fact that someone else’s “index” is not at the same scale as Google’s is irrelevant. If I scan 30 books, rather than Google’s millions, that just means I am a smaller “vertical” than Google.. a vertical centered around those 30 books. But if Google can do it, the precedent for me [and 300 million other people] is still set, no matter how many books any one of us does. )

Since I’m a nice guy, I will grant you the example-filled response :-)

And even the points you made after Firefox crashed are well taken. I realize that “the end justifies the means” isn’t necessarily a legal or moral principle that I want to be holding up as a model for online behaviour.

However, it’s also true (although IANAL) that copying is not always and everywhere a violation of copyright, and that in various judgments on the subject courts have taken the end uses to which content is put — and the accessibility of the copied material — as a mitigating factor. That is pretty much all I’m arguing.