Chapter 7 I Question 4 I Google.gov Is What's Good for Google Good for the Government

[Maha Alfasi]

Amazon is a site which is used only for selling the books. Then nobody can upload books illegally, while in Google, people can upload a scanned or pdf books. Do you think Google be able to preserve copyrights of the books? Why or Why not?

[Beverly Pell]

I might be wrong on this, but I think Google can upload scanned books whose copyright date has expired, or books by whom they have permission to use. For those books which Google does not gain copyright permissions, they can scan up to a percent of the book (for a preview) but not the entire book.

[Christopher Simpson]

Both google and Amazon show a percentage of the book, it just looks different depending on the service that you use.

For example:

In the Plex Amazon (Click on Look Inside)

In the Plex Google

If someone does upload a copyrighted book, it would be to Google Drive, not to Google Books, which is a paid ebook service.  The copyright holder can contact Google and ask that a file on Google Drive be removed if it violates copyright. The Google Transparency Report says more about what they do in that regard. 

Google has a project called the Google Books Library Project which scans old out of copyright books, but they are not the only ones doing it. Other companies such as the Internet Archive are doing it as well.

[Maha Alfasi]

I agree with you that the copyright holders are able asking  Google to remove the violating copyright, but it needs effort and time to find the violating copyright file in Google.

On Monday, April 6, 2015 at 2:24:32 PM UTC-5, Maha Alfasi wrote:

[sandra vega carrero]

No, I don't think so, it is very hard to control 100% what people do, and what to they post. I have found lots of books scanned and I have been able to download them without any problems. I don't see possible to preserve copyrights in a 100% of the time

On Monday, April 6, 2015 at 2:24:32 PM UTC-5, Maha Alfasi wrote:

[Melania Piedra Barrera]

No, I don't think so, at least not right now, but I have seeing improvements in that area.  Right now is more difficult than a few years ago to download books without permissions.

[Peter Schaad]

Currently, google is able to maintain the copyrights of the books it uploads.  However, I think that as a society, our values around copyrighted materials is changing.  There are so many other ways to access this data other than Google.  Eventually, I think we will see some sort of merger between these legal and illegal methods of obtaining materials.  

On Monday, April 6, 2015 at 2:24:32 PM UTC-5, Maha Alfasi wrote: