In opposing GooglePrint, Pat Schroeder and Bob Barr are guilty of the same kind of old-world idiocy that has been making the record industry look foolish for the past few years:

And so we find ourselves joining together to fight a $90 billion company bent on unilaterally changing copyright law to their benefit and in turn denying publishers and authors the rights granted to them by the U.S. Constitution.

Because as we all know the Constitution secures the rights of authors and publishers to disallow potential readers to judge the content of a book before buying it. It's right there between hate crimes and the diversity clause.

They claim that GooglePrint will not only change copyright law (solely for Google's financial gain), but that it stifles creativity because--get this--'If publishers and authors have to spend all their time policing Google for works they have already written, it is hard to create more.'

Asinine. What they mean to say is that if they're so consumed with trying to sue Google for a share of ad revenue, they'll lose time writing cheap political memoirs for the rocking chair set.

That's the underlying argument throughout, that Google will generate ad revenue while, like good anarchists, working to eliminate ownership rights. They don't resolve this contradiction, how anyone might actually be able to 'completely devalue everyone else's property and massively increase the value of its own.'

That's some neat trick. Google is apparently on the verge of controlling the world's economies.

They close with this insult (emphasis mine):

Politically, we may not agree on much. But on this, we can both agree: These lawsuits are needed to halt theft of intellectual property. To see it any other way is intellectually dishonest.

What's dishonest is taking the moral highground on the pretense of protecting property when in truth you just want a piece of ad revenue generated on web searches. By the logic here anyone whose 'intellectual property' were returned by a web search should get a few pennies, but of course that's ludicrous.

I was working on a paper on Ancient Greek hero cult when Amazon first allowed users to search books. I was amazed at the number of useful sources I was able to find, often buried within books I would never have thought to check. Neither there nor with GooglePrint are you able to read an entire book but both allow you to skim short samples and search for specific content to determine if a book is what you're looking for.

Think about this: it's the digital equivalent of picking a book up from the shelf (say, at a bookstore or the library) and flipping through the pages.

'Sorry ... you flipped it, you bought it.' The 'Schroedery Barrn rule'? (I hear you groaning, but I couldn't help myself.)