Do words have meanings--meanings that change slowly over time--or did that noted logician Charles L. Dodgson get it right when he had one of his more scholarly characters, H. Dumpty, assert that:
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less
To some extent, this essay--the second major essay in the July 2009 Cites & Insights--is about the proposed settlement of the Association of American Publishes and Authors Guild lawsuits against Google over Google Book Search.
To some extent, it's a followup to the issue-length Perspective: The Google Books Search Settlement, a 25,000-word, 30-page combination of thoughts, citations and commentary that makes up the March 2009 Cites & Insights.
But it's also, to a very great extent, about meaning--and whether it's acceptable to cry "foul!" when public intellectuals stretch the use of a word beyond (what I consider) reasonable limits in order to make political capital.
I didn't get into some secondary issues--for example:
- The works in question when Google's accused of "privatizing" library collections are not in the public domain--they're possibly-orphan works, which means they're still covered by copyright.
Most of this essay appeared earlier as blog posts and comments, but I believe it's easier to read and try to digest the set of arguments in this combined form. I recognize that some, maybe most, readers won't agree with me.
Oops, almost forgot: If you really hate PDF and want this article all by itself, in somewhat harder-to-read HTML, here you go.
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