The Ongoing Google Book Scanning Wars
Posted on August 14, 2006
The Washington Post has a lengthy article about Google's agreement with Stanford University to digitize the libarary's collection for its controversial digital library project. The Post does a good job of summarizing the dipsute between Google, the Authors Guild and the Association for American Publishers.
[T]he vice president for legal and government affairs for the Association of American Publishers sits in the trade association's offices at the foot of Capitol Hill, shaking his head at what he sees as the breathtaking arrogance of it all. "In order to provide online searchability," Adler says, Google has to create "a proprietary database that in essence would be the world's largest digital library." Extremely impressive, way cool -- and clearly of enormous value, or the company wouldn't be spending so much to do it. From New York, Authors Guild Executive Director Paul Aiken echoes Adler's incredulity. "It's an attempt to avoid licensing," Aiken says. "Without the ability to say no, a rights holder really has nothing to license." All together now: What part of "we own the copyright" doesn't Google understand?You know our position on this: we're with the Authors Guild, 100%. Just because Google thinks it would be an exciting idea to have every book digitized into an incredibly valuable proprietary database doesn't mean that Google is allowed to do it a) without first getting permission from copyright holders and b) by stealing royalites from authors. Get permission first or it's no dice.*****
Listen long enough to both sides in this dispute and your head will spin with legal citations and passionate argument. But it's possible to isolate key points of contention. Among them:
Copyright and fair use: As Google's Gerber puts it, the two sides obviously have a "fundamental difference about what is required to build an index of information." Because whole books or even whole pages are not displayed, Gerber and his colleagues argue, making copyrighted books searchable is the kind of "transformative use" permitted under copyright law. The publishers and the Authors Guild completely disagree, arguing that Google's unlicensed creation and retention of digital copies -- as well as its creation of additional copies for the libraries -- are illegal.
Money and motivation: "Google would like the world to see this as a purely altruistic act on its part," says the AAP's Adler. Instead, he argues, searchable books are part of the company's "very brilliant economic strategy" for differentiating itself from competitive search engines. If you're worried that Yahoo, Microsoft or some unknown startup will scoop up lucrative market share, adding books to your database helps you stay ahead. Google executives downplay this analysis but don't deny it. "The reason we're doing it," Wojcicki says, is that "making Google more comprehensive will yield a better search experience." Yes, that should lead -- eventually -- to more users and more revenue. But Book Search, she cautions, also represents a huge outlay of capital and isn't guaranteed to pay off anytime soon. It's a risk, as Gerber points out, you don't see publishers lining up to take.
The Web search analogy: This gets a bit complicated, but it's crucial to understanding the dispute over Google's library scanning. Wojcicki, Smith, Gerber and Google attorney Alexander Macgillivray -- whom Smith calls "our thought leader" on intellectual property issues -- all insist that there's very little difference between the basic functioning of their Web search engine and Book Search.