According to The Register, it appears that at least one publisher doesn't seem to understand the difference between helping more people find your books and theft.

Apparently the CEO of Macmillan Publishers decided to steal two Google laptops from Google's booth at BookExpo America, wait for Google employees to notice the missing laptops (took about an hour) and then claim that he was just giving Google "a taste of their own medicine."

From the article:

Angered by Google's attempts to copy their works, publishers have decided to strike back against the ad broker by stealing its technology.

Late last week, at New York City’s BookExpo America, the CEO of Macmillan Publishers pilfered two laptops from a booth where Google was promoting its Book Search service, part of an effort to convert the world’s books into digital format.

"There [was] no sign saying 'please do not steal the computers,'" Richard Charkin wrote on his blog. "I confess that a colleague and I simply picked [them] up."

After the heist, Charkin and his accomplice waited patiently beside the Google booth. More than an hour later, when booth workers noticed that the laptops were missing, Charkin explained that he was merely giving Google a taste of its own medicine. The booth workers were speechless.

With Book Search and its accompanying Library Project, Google is attempting to digitize the book collections held by many of the world’s leading libraries and serve them up to Web users. But in the fall of 2005—after the company began scanning collections at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, the New York Public Library, and others—the Association of American Publishers and The Author’s Guild filed suit against the company, claiming that the project infringed on the copyrights of publishers and authors. In many cases, Google won’t refrain from scanning a copyrighted book unless it receives a specific request from the copyright owner.

"If you don't want Google to digitize your books, you must tell them not to do it," Charkin told The Register. "With our heist, we were merely doing to Google what they're doing to us."

Source: The Register

Now there's some obvious bias here (as this is an IT magazine), but what do you think of this faceoff between MacMillan and Google?

Comments (6)

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tsopher said:

Well done on his part to point out the copyright issues faced by publishers. It's a shame that the CEO's tactics have now managed to effectively eclipse the problem he was intending to highlight and reroute the entire conversation to the stupidity of his actions.

June 07, 2007

anthrasula said:

The issue is whether you as the creator of a work should have control over what is done with that work for some period of time (Copyright, which imho IS too long currently). If I write a book, why should google be able to duplicate it and offer a service that goes well beyond 'fair use' without my permission. If I create a website, why should google be able to archive it without my permission. Yes in both cases you could say google was bring me more page views / readers, but that isn't the whole point, I didn't give them permission to, and that makes it just as wrong as me scanning a new book and putting it up on a filesharing network. Google is wrong on this one, and it shows how bullish they can be to get what they want.

June 07, 2007

rkelly said:

Google should be allowed to get on with scanning books that have had their copyright lapse or opened to the public domain. But authors who retain copyright don't want to wake up and find their recent works available for nothing on-line. I would suggest that users could choose 6 pages to browse of a copyrighted book. Then it's essentially a marketing bonus.

June 07, 2007

rhughes said:

I think they should publish a book with all possible google search results. THAT would teach Google not to mess with the almighty pen and paper.

June 07, 2007

stevenl said:

@anthrasula What about the evil public libraries allowing any published book to be read for FREE? Although it would be kind of hard to steal a library! Anyway, since we've got a bit of a discussion going, I've created a topic on the forum here.

June 07, 2007

tsopher said:

Hold on ? there's a lot of copyright violation/theft type things going on here. Personally, I am not against Google's project, but I am not an author. If I had a vested interest in the publishing world, I am sure that I would feel different. Anyway, back to the point : what McMillan man did would technically be classified as theft, or conversion, at best. I do not think a person of his reputation should be pulling high-school pranks of this nature, but then I was brought up to be courteous and respectful. Not that I always am, however.

June 07, 2007

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