Wow. I think we're making progress. Not in convincing the other person, but in understanding each other's point of view. I have just a few more questions.
And this is patently untrue. The only thing Google is doing that's on shaky ground is the redistribution. The searching and snippeting is not (permission is sought and gained for every webpage) since snippeting is covered under fair use already. If you shut down Google's redistributing practices (the displaying of cached webpages) the internet and indeed Google's role in it with the search capability they provide would carry on without a ripple.
I love the phrase, 'patently untrue', by the way.
So, you say you are uncomfortable with Google redistribution. This would pretty much shut down Internetarchive.com, but that's another topic. You are, however, OK with Google making a copy, storing it, and displaying snippets, right?
So you are saying this is OK to do with copyrighted material online, only because the mechanism used to display pages make copying pages necessary? And it doesn't apply to books because authors never agreed to allow somebody to make a copy to read it?
If so, I think I understand where you are coming from, but I'm pretty sure copyright laws don't delineates it in this way, and just because I put something on the web doesn't mean folks can make copies of it (other than caching). And I also would never suggest that Google should not be forced to stop making and redistributing their copies.
I think the benefits far outweigh the negatives. It is my opinion that authors will not lose rights or money, in fact for the most part they and their publishers will benefit from this project. With 60 percent of books out of the hands of the public, and since we have the technology to change that, I think it is our moral responsibility to do so.
I'd love to see all of the authors, who no longer see money from their books (because they are out of print, hook up with lulu.com and actually see profits again. People would find their books using Google print, find an interest, and then buy and print the book from lulu.
Again, I'm not trying to change your opinion, just telling you what mine is and the reasons for it.
It would be AWESOME. But it's not worth dumping everything out there into the public domain though. And once you make it legal for Google to make copies of books they don't own you make it legal for everyone to do it, since everyone is equal in the eyes of the law.
I have never supported dumping everything into the public domain. I do think that copying and displaying snippets should fall within Fair Use, because the damage to authors would be non-existant, and we would get information out to folks who might benefit from it.