LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
Amazon's Search Inside the Book and Two-Way Surveillance
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Thursday, October 30 @ 01:00:22 EST Copyright
Amazon's new Search Inside the Book feature lets you search for words inside some 120,000 of the books it sells. Amazon's move puts a fascinating twist on some familiar issues of data collection and surveillance. pages.

More inside . . .

Now, one the one hand, Amazon has. in one fell swoop, filled the single largest remaining hole in individuals' ability to search for information. The information on the 33 million pages Amazon indexed covers pretty much every topic of English-language human interest; the overwhelming majority of that information isn't available online anywhere except through Amazon's page-view feature -- which means it was heretofore invisible, from a search perspective. Merely bringing that information within the ambit of a search engine means that the ordinary individual now has substantially more useful power over the mountain of information that is our world today.

But on the other hand, in order to satisfy copyright concerns, Amazon restricts (or tries to restrict) the set of pages that anyone can see. With their old "look inside this book" feature, they'd let everyone in the world see a fixed, limited set of pages. But since the most useful part of search-our-collection is to let you see the relevant page, whatever that page may be, Amazon had to restrict your options in some other respect. Otherwise, you could just go to Amazon, "search" your way through every book they sell that you want to read, and completely destroy their core business.

Result: only registered users can use the new feature. Only users who supply credit card data can view pages. And Amazon is watching everyone closely. Try to go over 20% of the pages in any book, and they'll stop you. Try to read too many pages in too short a time, and they'll stop you. Find some other way to beat their system, and as soon as they figure out what you're doing, they'lll stop you. Anything less and they've never have gotten the publishers' approval for this feature.

Which is to say that "search inside the book" owes its very existence to a system of comprehensive surveillance. In exchange for letting you gain power over their information, Amazon demands a reciprocal measure of power over some of your information. You can look inside the book; Amazon can look inside your browsing habits.

This is an exercise in data-gathering that makes their old experiments with differential pricing look like child's play. Amazon could let people who bought plenty of books browse and search to their hearts' content, while throttling back the flow of pages to people who're perpetually window-shopping and never closing the deal. And, providing they were careful about it, no one could prove a thing, because the only one with a sufficient level of access to the comparative data necessary to prove such a differentiation would be Amazon itself.

What at least makes this trade palatable (in the sense that people aren't rioting in the streets over Amazon's actions), I think, is that it really is a trade. We're getting something in exchange for our bookstore browsing privacy. We're getting a really cool search feature, one that really does let us work with information in a new and exciting way.

All the same -- and despite thinking that this is an insanely cool search application -- I still haven't gotten around to looking at any actual pages . . .

 
Related Links
· More about Copyright
· News by James Grimmelmann


Most read story about Copyright:
Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Differential pricing (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, October 30 @ 13:57:40 EST
I hadn't heard about that before. How did they use it and how did it work?


[ Reply to This ]


Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
Everything else copyright (c) 2002 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php

Page Generation: 0.189 Seconds