[LINK] Google and the future of books

Anthony Hornby anthony.w.hornby at gmail.com
Thu Feb 5 10:32:33 AEDT 2009


Hi All,
I found this a facinating read, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281.
Does anyone on the list have enough knowledge of the Google Books
judgment to know whether the points the author raises about the impact
of it in this article are valid?

<snip>
In September and October 2005, a group of authors and publishers
brought a class action suit against Google, alleging violation of
copyright. Last October 28, after lengthy negotiations, the opposing
parties announced agreement on a settlement, which is subject to
approval by the US District Court for the Southern District of New
York.[2]

....

After reading the settlement and letting its terms sink in—no easy
task, as it runs to 134 pages and 15 appendices of legalese—one is
likely to be dumbfounded: here is a proposal that could result in the
world's largest library. It would, to be sure, be a digital library,
but it could dwarf the Library of Congress and all the national
libraries of Europe. Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement
with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world's
largest book business—not a chain of stores but an electronic supply
service that could out-Amazon Amazon.

An enterprise on such a scale is bound to elicit reactions of the two
kinds that I have been discussing: on the one hand, utopian
enthusiasm; on the other, jeremiads about the danger of concentrating
power to control access to information.

Who could not be moved by the prospect of bringing virtually all the
books from America's greatest research libraries within the reach of
all Americans, and perhaps eventually to everyone in the world with
access to the Internet? Not only will Google's technological wizardry
bring books to readers, it will also open up extraordinary
opportunities for research, a whole gamut of possibilities from
straightforward word searches to complex text mining. Under certain
conditions, the participating libraries will be able to use the
digitized copies of their books to create replacements for books that
have been damaged or lost. Google will engineer the texts in ways to
help readers with disabilities.

......

Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly. On
the contrary, it has pursued a laudable goal: promoting access to
information. But the class action character of the settlement makes
Google invulnerable to competition. Most book authors and publishers
who own US copyrights are automatically covered by the settlement.
They can opt out of it; but whatever they do, no new digitizing
enterprise can get off the ground without winning their assent one by
one, a practical impossibility, or without becoming mired down in
another class action suit. If approved by the court—a process that
could take as much as two years—the settlement will give Google
control over the digitizing of virtually all books covered by
copyright in the United States.


.....

As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be
called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel
but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors.
Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books several months
ago, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly
the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and
ineffective in comparison with Google. Google alone has the wealth to
digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and
publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a
protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire
class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to
digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could
afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all
over again. If the settlement is upheld by the court, only Google will
be protected from copyright liability.


</snip>

Thanks a lot.

Regards Anthony




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