Virgil Goode says that “the United States, by removing Saddam Hussein, has provided a great opportunity for Iraq to be a showcase for tolerance and understanding.” Can’t argue with the sentiment, but man, coming from this guy, the irony meter surges past the breaking point, spilling irony all over the keyboard.
Cory Doctorow, SF author and blogger, has published the most sensical discussion of Google Book Search I’ve yet seen:
But these objections reflect a nonsensical vision of how copyright law and computer security work. The reality is that the biggest threat to book-writers and publishers is that their works are simply invisible to people who get all their information from the Internet. Google Book Search makes our books visible to those people. In so doing, Google will save our asses from oblivion. Instead of sending legal threats to Google, I think that writers and publishers should be sending them fruit-baskets and thank-you notes.
Google Book Search is an index, which only copies works in the course of indexing them. If you are an author or publisher and object to inclusion of your work(s) in the index, Google will freely accommodate your stupidity.
