Baloney

Google ended up settling a suit from Viacom on its Google Books Project for $125 million. VIacom issued the following statement: "Copyright laws provide creators with the incentive to create the works consumers crave. It is unfortunate that the publishers had to spend years, and millions of dollars, for Google to honor that principle. We hope that Google avoids the wasted effort and comes more quickly to respect movies and television programming."

The Books project is attempting to digitize the library collections of major libraries in the United States. That will make those collections more useful to our society. But Viacom wants to look at this in simple monetary terms. Ultimately, the vast majority of those efforts will work with publications that are either out of print (but not out of the outrageous length of the current standard of copyright under the DCMA) or mostly out of use.

When the founders debated copyright there was a tension between two sides - one who argued that ideas are inherently not tied to private rights and the other that argued that creators of ideas needed the incentive to create. This silly decision moves the balance away from the original intent to encourage the exchange of ideas in a free society. It is unfortunate and baloney at the same time.