gerloff
|
09. diciembre 2005
Maybe it's just me today, but this outburst of
ignorance reported on The Register really has
me fuming.
The latest in a series of idiocies in the publishing industry's campaign against
Google Books features Francisco Pinto Balsemao, head of the European Publishers
Council, ranting about "parasitic" search firms:
The Associated Press reports that Francisco Pinto Balsemao told a
conference in Brussels that Google and others were attempting to reverse
the traditional permission-based copyright model.
Warming to his theme, he said it was fascinating to see how these
companies help themselves to copyright-protected material, build up
their own business models around what they have collected, and
parasitically, earn advertising revenues off the back of other peoples
content.
While Balsemao slated Google and the like, he accepted that consumers too
had to be weaned off free content, so that the publishing industry could
legal certainty and the confidence that their intellectual property will
be protected.The Associated Press reports that Francisco Pinto Balsemao told a
conference in Brussels that Google and others were attempting to reverse
the traditional permission-based copyright model.
Mr Balseamo follows the music industry down the well-trodden path to the
commercial lunatic asylum where everyone looking at material you hold rights to
means a lost sale, and customers are criminals. He entirely fails to realise
that Google Books amounts to the greatest advertising campaign for books he
could never imagine.
The point he so gloriously misses is that books and computers are different media altogether.
Mr Balseamo, I challenge you to introduce me to a single individual on this
planet who will read through Shakespeare's collected works on Google Books.
