That John Martin

In answer to John Battelle, I don’t think I can buy into Brian’s argument against Lessig on the Google Book Search case. Like Kelly vs Arriba, it seems clear to me that the snippets provided by Google as search results are in fact transformations of the original work that are not substitutable for the original work. Regardless of the fact that the scans are performed at a high dots-per-inch, or that the indexes cover the entirety of the text, when the snippets are presented to the user they are of lesser value precisely because they are snippets. By and large, the value of text is in the information it conveys, not in the clarity of the typeface in which it is presented, and when context is removed, as is the case with the snippets, the information provided by a particular piece of text is obscured, and the value is lessened.

BTW, I love the less-is-more deck that Lessig presents in his talk.

Update: From Brian’s comment below it seems I misunderstood his gripe, which was with the internal copies that Google are making for processing.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 12:27 pm and is filed under uncategorized.