New York Times on monetizing the process by which blogs and online aggregators excerpt published work. If Google News makes a business out of referring readers to others’ work, and Google collects ad revenue from the process, does it owe a slice of its take to all the sites it’s referencing?

Yup, probably.

And here we are linking to them too. This gets self-referential real fast.

There’s been much linking-to of Robert Darnton’s essay Google and the Future of Books in the New York Review of Books

He does give much information and much to ponder, but it all seems suffused with what might be called the Librarian’s Fallacy: that access that is not free (as in unpaid) is access denied. And the fears about some particularly dangerous Google monopoly seems Chicken-Littlish. Digital technology has indeed been a tremendous creator of near-monopolies, but technology has a way of overcoming them too. Two words: WordPerfect 4.2 (How many words is that?). Remember all the litigation over Internet Explorer’s monopoly? IE certainly killed Netscape Navigator, but now Firefox and the others seem perfectly capable of replacing IE should users be inclined to change.

The root fear of this article seems to be of new evidence of how flexible copyright actually is, how it can adapt to new technologies and situations, how respect for creators’ rights can actually coexist with digital technology without the sky falling.

…when the state of the business is like this.

..courtesy of Lawrence Lessig’s site

Future of blogging: big and dumb. Based on the selling eyeballs model, it becomes kinda like TV in the vast wasteland days.

Now that Google has reached an agreement in which rightsholders will be paid for use of their work on Google’s bookscanning project, Harvard has decided it will not make copyright works in its library available for copying. Just doesn’t wanna run the risk of having to pay for other people’s work. Fortunately Google will have other sources of books to scan.

[Thanks to the Canadian Magazines blog for the link.]

Publishers Weekly reports Google has settled with a coalition of authors and publishers in the United States and will begin paying to licence access to the copyrighted works it includes in its “Index to Everything” essentially, a project to scan the text of every book in the world and make it searchable.

Authors and publishers received a lot of abuse as luddites and enemies of progress from IP scholars and freecopiers on this issue. But this is the solution that was always available. These rights were always available for licensing once Google was amenable to recognizing the value in the rights they wanted access to. It was never a problem about access, just a problem of unwillingness to pay. And since Google’s capital reserves are immense and the earnings potential of its indexing project equally large, that was not really a problem either.

Some background to the story is available here , if you read far enough.

Andrew Keen doesn’t think so. I’m not convinced.

John Degen, executive director of PWAC, CCC stalwart, and creator copyright activist par excellence had been named as the new literature officer at the Ontario Arts Council. He’ll do terrific work there, but he’ll be missed in the advocacy role he’s filled so well in recent years.

John Degen, here, looks into dodgy campaign pledge demands that have been orchestrated by law professor Michael Geist. The comments are a must-see too.