I've been following the Google Books controversy for some time now, with mixed feelings. (Noting that it sits outside my general area of interest of printers, but hey, they use scanners to implement it, right?)
The power to search across a broad library of reference material in BOOKS, in addition to WEB PAGES, really seems to bring full realization to the promise of "information at your fingertips". However, I am respectful of copyright and intellectual property ownership, thus the mixed emotions. However, once again, Mike at Techdirt succinctly summarizes the pros of letting Google (or Amazon or Yahoo) take on the centralized task rather than having individual publishers do their own indexing for just their properties.
The power to search across a broad library of reference material in BOOKS, in addition to WEB PAGES, really seems to bring full realization to the promise of "information at your fingertips". However, I am respectful of copyright and intellectual property ownership, thus the mixed emotions. However, once again, Mike at Techdirt succinctly summarizes the pros of letting Google (or Amazon or Yahoo) take on the centralized task rather than having individual publishers do their own indexing for just their properties.
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The only way that we can truly prevent piracy is to be obscure... but then how much do we actually sell?
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antra
HP 4600 Toner