Fair use came into being before the ability of a few billion people to get quotes from a book without having to have it in front of them. Surely to be fair, if you want to quote from a book, you can either go to a library or buy the book or borrow it. But the library is Google Print you say! Right, so instead of 12500 libraries each buying 4 copies of the book, you just have Google scanning it in and giving it to the world to quote from? Where does the publisher or author make money?

So going back to my €220 Constitutional Law book. If that was freely available online, even just snippets of it, less people would buy it. Not that many people are keen to buy such an expensive book but we have to. A few people spent a few years of their lives researching that book and putting it together. The audience for it is very limited, probably just Irish Law students and practitioners. I doubt it will be a bestseller even in a niche market. The author and the publisher need to get back their investment from this book.

I hear lots of arguments about how they can make money from somewhere else, some other ways of distribution and give the core content away for free. But that’s like saying to a famous bakery that you are now giving away the secret recipe to their “wonder cake” after you walking into their kitchen and scanning it in. Now you tell them they should think of another way of leveraging their baking abilities. You are taking their sales channel and smashing it.

As a slight aside, if you wanted to quote a line from a book, surely you would need context, you’d need to have a better insight into the paragraph and the chapter the line came from.