I ♥ Google Print

So, the first year med students started a new class a few weeks ago called Clinical Ethics. While some have pronounced their enthusiasm for all-things-philosophical, my reaction was rather muted. Let me expain. I enjoy the occasional heady discussion, but amidst the rigors of gross anatomy and histology—with exams just a week and half away—I could not be easily swayed in my opinion nor my level of enthusiasm. Add on a few essays and non-science (read: non-gross anatomy) readings, and I would not call myself “enthralled” with this class, until my first essay for this class came into being.

The first assignment turned out to be less of an essay and more of a subjective, “What is your code of ethics” akin to the Hippocratic Oath. We had a few reading of other codes of ethical conduct put out by a nursing association, a managed healthcare organization, and an excerpt of the wonderfully-consistent and apt Edmund Pellegrino, who sits on the President’s Council on Bioethics. His writing, while verbose by normal standards, offered pertinent insight into the field of medicine and who defines it and how they go about it. (I may delve into the particulars in a future post.)

It turns out that in my personal code of ethics, I wanted to quote Pellegrino saying something along the lines of , ”...should not be used to frustrate the ends of medicine.” Of course, I remembered the word frustrate, but how do you go about finding that phrase amongst the tens of pages that I had just read? Enter Google Print. I had never used it before this occasion, but it allowed to me to quickly search for Pellegrino’s work and find the title. Luckily it was in their collection. I entered the word frustrate into the “Search this book” field and voilà, I was staring at the very page I wanted.

The controversy of Google Print as infringing on the copyrights of authors is very interesting. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal that offered great insight into some of the reasons for Google’s interest into scanning, digitizing and indexing the world’s compendium of written knowledge. In it, he addresses the lawsuits brought by publishers and makes a very strong case for why the lawsuits will fail. His points are compelling, namely that:

• Publishers and authors can opt out of the program.
• Copyrighted materials will not allow huge chunks to be viewed
• Search engine indexing of the internet is no different than indexing books: it offers one to search through the contents, not necessarily give them away for free
• Google Print has direct links to allow users to buy books in and out of print

• Google Print will increase the exposure of lesser-known authors

  Granted, Google will have full copies of all these books, but copyright and fair use has always stemmed, at least in my opinion, from intention and not acts. Google has no intention of freely distributing copyrighted works, and the intentions of Google surely must fall under fair use. Google’s primary goals are in line with the very reason fair use exists: to expand the reach and utility to society of these creations. What more argument do you need?