Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash started up a blog recently, and he’s weighed in on the lawsuit filed by the Academy of American Publishers against Google over its digital library project. Although he’s a member of the AAP’s committee of small and independent publishers, Nash disagrees with the Academy’s position and, he writes, “it’s not even, unfortunately, something I can just keep quiet about disagreeing with either.” He elaborates:
“The fundamental goal of copyright in the Constitution is not to confer an absolute property right but rather to stimulate cultural production: a limited property right being a means to that end, rather than an end in itself. Thus we are always intrinsically talking about relative values, trade-offs, balancing acts, etc. Having the world’s books available in searchable and granular format online is a tremendous boon to the culture, and will result in more and better books. Again and again, in comments issued by publishers and authors, by the AAP and the Authors Guild, there is a profound failure to perceive that such rights are not absolute property rights, but relative property rights, issued provisionally to achieve a larger social purpose. That is how it is, and how it should be.”