[BlueTemplar]

In this case the issue seems to have come from "copyright minimalists" instead : wanting the books to be freely available, rather than making money for Google...

I wonder why the Copyright Office didn't just buy Google Books, would only have cost a few hundred million $ ?

[jandrese]

> Upon hearing that Google was taking millions of books out of libraries, scanning them, and returning them as if nothing had happened, authors and publishers filed suit against the company, alleging, as the authors put it simply in their initial complaint, “massive copyright infringement.”

This is where the project derailed and never quite recovered.

[BlueTemplar]

Did we read the same article ?

EDIT :

> As Tim Wu pointed out in a 2003 law review article, what usually becomes of these battles—what happened with piano rolls, with records, with radio, and with cable—isn’t that copyright holders squash the new technology. Instead, they cut a deal and start making money from it.

[...]

> now, in 2011, there was a plan—a plan that seemed to work equally well for everyone at the table

[...]

> DOJ’s intervention likely spelled the end of the settlement agreement. No one is quite sure why the DOJ decided to take a stand instead of remaining neutral. Dan Clancy, the Google engineering lead on the project who helped design the settlement, thinks that it was a particular brand of objector—not Google’s competitors but “sympathetic entities” you’d think would be in favor of it, like library enthusiasts, academic authors, and so on—that ultimately flipped the DOJ.

[guidoism]

I’m fairly confident that google books is a huge money loser for google. The only reason it’s still online is because there are people within google willing to stick their necks out to spend the money on it.

[BlueTemplar]

Indeed, but for how long, considering the Google Books team itself seemingly wants to delete the ~100M books database ?

P.S.: Might be soon, considering that it was basically what Google was initially about, and one of the founders just resigned from Alphabet...

[dredmorbius]

Source on the deletion initiative?

[BlueTemplar]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694061

[dredmorbius]

Thanks, though I was hoping for better than an HN comment...