It seems to me that Google, whose products I find immensely useful, has stepped over the line with Google Print. Google has essentially decided to accrue to itself the right to copy anyone’s work for its own commercial purposes, and copyright laws be damned. It justifies this massive infringement of authorial privilege by claiming that it will not be distributing the work, just providing a “sneak peek” alongside which it will run the ads from which it makes its money. So what? This still drives a coach and horses through the whole basis of the system whereby authors are compensated for use someone else makes of their work, which is not some protectionist racket but an evolved market mechanism centuries in the making. Google could avoid these problems by doing what everyone else does when they want to exploit someone else’s intellectual property and sign a license agreement, but instead Google wants people to opt out rather than opt in. And, let’s face it, if this tool will be the huge marketing opportunity Google says it will, most authors will want to opt in and their publishers will encourage them to do so. Yet Google wants to miss out that important step whereby the market gains information, presumably in order to reduce its own costs. That sort of approach, cutting corners with people’s rights in order to reduce inconvenience to your operations, is, I think, the sort of thing that governments tend to do. Google needs to act more like Amazon and less like the EPA.