Oxford University Press business development VP Evan Schnittman recently discussed the rift between publishers and Google on the OUP blog, zeroing in on MacMillan CEO Richard Charkin‘s sticky-fingered BookExpo stunt, saying that if Charkin really wanted to mirror what Google is doing to publishers, he should have given that stolen laptop to somebody else. “Google doesn’t have the right to digitize and index the content without permission either—and they especially don’t have the right to digitize the content and then give it to a third party!” Schnittman writes. “Neither Google nor the participating libraries are following the well established and longstanding protocol of rights licensing. By pushing the onus of identifying individual copyrights that should NOT be included in a program without license, they are turning upside down the very nature of licensing.”
And yet, Schnittman acknowledges, “Google Library can be an important program for publishers and authors… The wholesale digitization and discoverability of the most important content in our collective intellectual history is a really amazing concept.” All publishers want is the opportunity to give Google, or somebody else with “the ambition, vision, and strength of resolve Google has shown,” permission to make all those scanned pages available to the masses.