Saturday, November 15 2003
Publishers, authors groups and Martin Garbus all continue to find the new phase of Search Inside the Book troubling, for both legal and practical reasons.
The Guild remains the most outspoken; after sending an email to authors last week advising of potential copyright violations, it spoke of a practical dimension today. "It took a member of our staff about twenty minutes to download and print 20 percent of a book," said the Guild's legal counsel, Kay Murray, referring to the maximum amount any one user can view. "Five college students working on different computers could download an entire book, so for Amazon to say it's no more than a few pages, that's just wrong."
Murray said the Guild is debating further action but if publishers agree to ask Amazon to take books down as soon as an author makes a request, that would make such action unlikely. A few authors, she said, have already registered such wishes to their houses.
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