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basically what is going to happen is that an author writes a book- takes years to do so or whatever- google has soemoen take 10 minutes or so to automatically scan the work, and offer it for free online, for now, with the eventual thought of charging to read the online content- meaning hte actual author will be udnersold for his OWN work and be bankrupted after having done all that work while google becoems rich after having done hardly any work

Let's see.. First, Google allows for you to find results that reference the book, which you can then buy from an authorized publisher. You can not read more than a brief excerpt of the material.

But let's step beyond that. Almost all of the vast library of scanned books are written by people who have passed on. Most of the contemporary works Google has in their system are provided by publishers, not Google's scans.

The constitution authorizes patents and protections of works for A LIMITED TIME. I can find no reference from that period that implies that 'limited time' means anything close to the current LIFETIME of the author + 70 years (with possible renewals.)

So, yeah, what basically happened was an author wrote a book, the publisher stopped printing anymore, the author died, the book has been sitting on a musty shelf for going on 3 generations and then Google came through and gave the work new life by scanning it.

You are most welcome to send them a thank you card.

2 problems with your argument- the article mentioned nothing abotu out of print or out of copywrite except to say the books are ‘frequently’ out of copywrite- not ‘always’ second- the article didn’t mention anything about google only doing excerpts- it talked about putting the books on line

[[First, Google allows for you to find results that reference the book,]]

You’re talking about something different- their refences search engine, not their actual google books scanned site- you’ll see the list below to the google books scanned site-

[[ Almost all of the vast library of scanned books are written by people who have passed on.]]

Where do you get that info from? I see lots of books scanned there from recent years- and i see full books as well=- not excerpts

https://archive.org/details/googlebooks?&sort=-date&and[]=subject%3A%22American%20literature%22

[[So, yeah, what basically happened was an author wrote a book, the publisher stopped printing anymore, the author died, the book has been sitting on a musty shelf for going on 3 generations and then Google came through and gave the work new life by scanning it.]]

That’s not all that is going on and why the writers guild tried to stop google from doing this-