When Management gets stupid
You have to love the stupidity of MacMillan exec Richard Charkin, who seems to think that copying books for search purposes is the same thing as stealing a laptop:
It's no secret that a number of publishers have been up in arms about Google's approach to digitizing their works, but Richard Charkin went so far as to recruit a colleague and swipe a pair of laptops from a Google Books kiosk at the event. About an hour later, the booth attendants actually noticed the missing goods and presumably began to panic, and the haughty executive then had the nerve to return the machines to their rightful owners whilst dropping the "hope you enjoyed a taste of your own medicine" line. He justified the bizarre behavior by suggesting that "there wasn't a sign by the computers informing him not to steal them," apparently referencing Google's controversial tactics when scanning books.
I don't recall Google copying books and then handing them out or reselling them - I guess that was too advanced a point for Charkin to grasp.
Technorati Tags: stupidity
Comments
[Ziv Caspi] June 9, 2007 5:04:59.298
If you're not using your laptop, why can't I "borrow" it for an hour under the "fair use" doctrine?
I explained that...
[ James Robertson] June 9, 2007 9:23:17.420
Comment by James Robertson
Ziv,
I explained that above. You might also want to listen to the "Buzz out Loud" podcast over the last week for a good summary. Bottom line: electronic documents are simply not the same as physical goods, and trying to pretend that they are is not working well. Not to mention that in the case of Google, they aren't reselling/redistributing - they are essentially making searchable photocopies.
Which makes it more likely that I'll find a book reference and buy it, actually.
Captain Jack
[Isaac Gouy] June 9, 2007 13:04:49.310
James Robertson wrote "seems to think that copying books for search purposes is the same thing as stealing a laptop
You seem to think that "borrowing" is the same as "theft" (probably specific to national law).
James Robertson wrote "electronic documents are simply not the same as physical goods
True but irrelevant.
Is using CincomSmalltalk NonCommercial for commercial purposes without payment to Cincom theft?
Is it breach of license?
[Isaac Gouy] June 9, 2007 18:02:05.630
Seems like the underscore in the URL was tranformed to a markup style
Theft act 1968
Pete F
[as stunts go] June 10, 2007 9:01:30.380
clearly it would have been a better metaphor if the guy had gone over to Larry Page's place, walked in -and taken photos of all Larry's stuff so we would search online to see what Larry had in there...
but hey, the stunt apparently worked anyway