I went to see a new orthopedist the other week to complain about my backpain, the doctor prescribed pain relievers for temporary relief and told me that I should work-out. As he was writing the instruction he stopped and told me, just “google” it. This just shows how pervasive Google is in our lives it seems to be the twin of internet. Today, Google is not merely a search engine, it owns Youtube, Google Earth, Google maps etc and is now expanding to be the ultimate repository and organizer of knowledge. Google Book Search Project aims to digitize and index millions of volumes from the world's most prestigious libraries in order to make them searchable. While this is good news for us students in this third world country (for obvious reasons) ,a class action brought by authors and publishers, claiming that Google has violated their copyrights and those of other Rights holders, by scanning their Books, creating an electronic database and displaying short excerpts without the permission of the copyright holders. Recent news says that a settlement agreement (http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/) is in the works to end the case which was started in 2005.
While I respect the rights of the rights owner, I cannot help but think of how beneficial google books is to me, in this regard the copying is justified by the beneficial nature of the resulting use (see Kelly case).
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