I realize that I'm quoting Amazon's spin here, but that's where the idea comes from. Note that the concern is not that Google is acquiring exclusive rights.
aye, that was pretty much my point. there are some very valid concerns here and debate is necessary but it gets horribly muddied when made up issues capture the public eye. google buying exclusive rights to books is misinformation equivalent to the death panels in american health care.
I was just trying to answer your question of where the idea of Google's book scheme being evil comes from. The answer: Google's competitors (but also, the ACLU and privacy groups, though for different reasons.
again, it wasn't so much the groups opposed to google i was trying to find but the source of misunderstanding/misinformation that's making a lot of people believe that google is buying exclusive rights to books.
Microsoft didn't do anything different than any other big corporation in the tech industry - what sets them apart is that they were caught.
it's more than that. publicly, as international html & internet protocols were being established, microsoft would actively pursue inefficient algorithms just because they owned the rights or didn't want to change their aging software. effectively they wanted to hurt the industry as a whole to save themselves some effort. when people tried to work with microsoft products they would find the interfaces changed for no apparent reason, creating pointless busywork for any microsoft competitors.
they don't play well with others and not just in ways that get them sued. they're getting better but it's a long hard road if they want to earn the industry's trust.
google not only doesn't do these things, they actively go out of their way to make sure their position helps the everyone in the long run.
Google, I am 100% certain, is getting away with as much stuff as it can now, before the scrutiny catches up.
you live in a cold, hard world my friend =) i play tit for tat. live cautiously but don't believe the worst of people until they give you reason (though i'm ready to consider many thing a reason. in other threads, you might have noticed my tendency to read into patterns).
Mod:You probably noticed it's been split off. Not every reference has been moved, but oh well.
aye, well split that way. when in doubt leave it with the original thread.
i'd still appreciate a notice & link to the split threads in the original post. there's been a few times i've wasted effort trying to figure out what was going on in a thread before finding a notice buried in page three that the thread was split.