Tim riffs on Larry Lessig’s latest post about what makes for true sharing sites (he says YouTube is not), vs. “fake” sharing sites. He brings up a great question about Google Book Search which I asked some time ago, but had forgotten:
Now that Google has gone to the expense of creating an online book repository, will they have the courage to set that content loose, either licensing it back to publishers for use in other contexts, or in the case of public domain content, releasing not just the scanned images but also the text?
Or, as I was saying yesterday, why does Google not allow metasearch of its results? If it were a “true” sharing site, wouldn’t it openly welcome developers who wanted to mashup its SERPs with those of Yahoo and Ask and MS? Just like Google Print, I swear I would only display snippets of Google SERPs. Wouldn’t this metasearch/boosting function I am creating thus be considered fair use? So why won’t Google share the love? (And if Google Print wins in court, will that mean it doesn’t matter what Google wants.. we will all have the fair use right to snippetize their SERPs, anyway?)