Richard Charkin is an unrepentant thief. Charkin, a UK executive with publisher Macmillan, attended last week's Book Expo America in New York and decided to make his feelings about Google Book Search clear by teaching Google a lesson: he stole two of the company's laptops.

His point was that Google Book Search is "stealing" the work of authors and publishers without permission, and Charkin wanted to see if Google's boffins enjoyed having the same thing done to them. He recounts the incident on his personal blog. "A colleague and I simply picked up two computers from the Google stand and waited in close proximity until someone noticed," he says. "This took more than an hour. Our justification for this appalling piece of criminal behaviour? The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property."

The object lesson is unlikely to change Google's opinion of its project, and Charkin's charade elides the differences between what Google is doing for books and what a thief does when he snatches a laptop from the backseat of a car. Such was Lawrence Lessig's view, at least, and Lessig pointed out that Google Book Search does not indiscriminately post books under copyright. If the book is under copyright and still in print, Google Book Search will only show selections from it that are authorized by the publisher. The book Middlesex, for example, published by Picador, displays a limited preview of certain chapters authorized by the publisher. (Microsoft has made much of its rival project, with a stronger opt-in system for rightsholders, as being a better choice for publishers.)

Books that remain under copyright but are out of print can be extremely difficult to clear the rights for, and for these works, Google does show "snippets" of the pages containing search terms. These snippets are quite limited (a couple of sentences), and only a fixed amount will be shown per book, per user. Google explains that if books are still under copyright, "we only show basic information about the book, similar to a card catalog, and, in some cases, a few snippets—sentences of your search terms in context. The aim of Google Book Search is to help you discover books and learn where to buy or borrow them, not read them online from start to finish." Google believes that these snippets constitute fair use, and that if they are outlawed, Google's entire ability to index the web is in jeopardy.

Lessig also points out that making a copy of a digital work is essentially different from stealing someone's laptop; when the laptop disappears, the user no longer has access to it and has lost something important and costly. The same is not true when Google scans a book.

Charkin has certainly been hearing this point repeatedly from critics. In a more recent blog entry, he said that he has been characterized "variously as a fool, a child, a luddite, a crook, or a counter-revolutionary. Hey ho. At least it has generated debate, not least as to whether physical property has greater rights to protection than intellectual property."

A complex debate

Charkin certainly doesn't represent all the views of the industry. The book business is convulsed with debate over the topic of how best to go digital. A Random House VP that I spoke with several weeks ago said that there is no single corporate perspective on the issue of working with Google or similar services, and he encouraged the tech world not to give into the myth of believing that publishers are "old-school and lazy."

Publishers want to embrace the digital future, and they're all doing it in different ways, but there's a real worry that Google and Amazon book search services encourage people to believe that digital book content is worth little. If publishers aren't careful, they might devalue future digital sales, just as P2P has encouraged plenty of consumers to believe that music ought to be free.

Yes, Google will certainly help to drive paper sales in the short term, but people are quickly growing used to getting digital content for free. As these companies plan to offer more digital products down the road, they worry that consumers are being primed to expect an ultra-low price that could decimate their profits and even put them out of business.

The issue is made even more complicated because the debate is not just among publishers. Authors too have opinions, and they can be utterly polarized. Large companies have to deal with thousands of authors, each of whom has a different view on how content should be marketed and made available, and that's not even mentioning the entire issue of backlist authors, whose contracts made no reference at all to Internet or electronic distribution.

It may actually be the courts that have the final word here. Google is currently defending itself against major lawsuits from publishers and the Authors Guild over the uses it makes of copyrighted works. Google has been trying to dispel some of the bad will created among publishers by the Book Search program and to educate people about how the service actually works—thus, their appearance at Book Expo America. The fact that a publishing executive would steal the company's laptops, then wait around for more than an hour just so the theft would be noticed, suggests that Google has plenty of work left to do.