Information/knowledge/expression/data/ideas/what-have-you. In a digital world, I'd like to see them all be freely copyable. We're entering an age of abundance, where everyone can have something just by virtue of it having been produced once.

But the key is how to we create the incentives for that production, right? I wouldn't necessarily do away with copyright, but I'd drastically reduce the term of it. I think people will create the same works for a twenty year term as they will for a life plus fifty term. (Although 20 years is still too long.)

Another important point is that the genie is out of the bottle. In a free world, with machines that are designed at a low-level to copy bits, we're not going to be able to effectively enforce copyright. Not unless we sacrifice a lot of freedom and suffer intrusive measures.

Anyway, I've already thrown out many more rambling words written in response -- your comments deserve a better response than I have time to write at the moment. I'd like to state my position more coherently, but that will have to wait for another day. (Or never, since I'm not an especially disciplined thinker on these issues!) :-)

Finally, I'll defer to http://www.questioncopyright.org as a place for better articulation of concerns around copyright.

And finally x2, just to be clear, I wouldn't advocate people break the law and make illegal copies. People should honor copyright. Two licenses that I support strongly -- the GPL and Creative Commons -- rely on it. However, I don't want to see fair use trampled either, and that is what I think Google's book search should be considered as.

Books represent the tangible expression of thought, which is subject to copyright protection. Anti-copyright advocates often confuse information with expression. Is a biography of John Adams merely information? No, it is the author's creative interpretation of information.

Nobody should own information. But it is bad to duplicate expression without license, because the person doing the duplicating didn't create it and doesn't own it.

If you have bought a book, you have purchased a licensed duplicate, but that doesn't mean you own the expression within it, and you have no right to share duplicates with others. The copyright holder owns the expression. This is the essence of copyright law, and few authors would bother to publish anything without that protection.

A library offers access to books. Anyone can walk in and read a book. A web page can similarly offer access to books. Why is it bad to let people access the information online rather than in the physical building of a library? The "problem" we have now is the easy duplication of books. Is it only good to have open access if it's difficult to get to and use?

Speaking of straw men, if we confiscated all personal computers, their owners would no longer have the use of them. Google's copy of a book doesn't deprive the owner of that book his or her use of it.

There would also be a great public benefit to confiscating all personal computers in the country and distributing them to the poor. Any volunteers?

Both links above are broken, and are now:

[redacted -- they switched back again -- I picked a bad day to link to lessig.org posts!]

Will get these updated and look for some other broken ones.

Mario: I thought I heard at one time that they would make the public domain works available in their entirety.

I think what they are doing is different from mining, forestry and fishing in that this is a digital commons, so their use of the material doesn't consume it and prevent others from using it also. (Leaving out the wear-and-tear they may cause while scanning.) Sure they're a corporation looking to make a buck, but I think it's still a public benefit.

However, I agree that the information should be free as in freedom, and not just speech. But if our government isn't going to work on that project, I'm happy that *someone* is for now.

Google is looking to make these books free as in beer, which is inarguably a valuable service, but it's not a public benefit until the information is truly free.