The World Needs More Ninjas

According to this editorial in the Washington Times, Google’s new service is going to destroy intellectual property rights. Let’s check their claims.

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.

It’s worth remembering that the gatekeepers will always oppose something that circumvents their authority. Industries built on controlling access will always oppose competition and come up with reasons why the competition is inferior or immoral or both. It’s simply in their interest to do so. Disruptive technology is not pleasant for old business models. History has plenty examples of fire being forced back in the bottle because the old industry was scared. US vacuum tube manufacturers didn’t like transistors, so the US lost the electronics industry to Japan.

Internet behemoth Google, plans to launch their Library project in November. It plans to scan the entire contents of the Stanford, Harvard and University of Michigan libraries and make what it calls “snippets” of the works available online, for free.

The creators and owners of these copyrighted works will not be compensated, nor has Google defined what a “snippet” is: a paragraph? A page? A chapter? A whole book? Meanwhile Google will gain a huge new revenue stream by selling ad space on library search results. Selling ads on its search engine is how Google makes 99 percent of its billions.

Did they ever even think of searching Google’s current databases to see what a “snippet” might look like? Guess what…Google Scholar already allows content searches on copyrighted academic publishing! Check out one of their searches to see what a snippet looks like. Google’s web searches provide snippets on web pages as well, which also happen to be copyrighted material. Looks like a couple of sentences, at most, to me.

Plus, the delineations they suggest are arbitrary anyway. Some books have chapters that consist only of a paragraph. Jack Kerouac’s On The Road novel was originally written as one long paragraph. So just making the delineations they propose for a snippet won’t necessarily be meaningful.

Our laws say if you wish to copy someone’s work, you must get their permission. Google wants to trash that.

Because, I’m sure that no one has ever made a copy of a page in a library book without getting the author and publisher’s permission first, right? No?! Oh…right, because our laws have fair use provisions.

Google’s position essentially amounts to a license to steal, so long as it returns the loot upon a formal request by their victims. This is precisely why Google’s argument has no basis in U.S. intellectual property law or jurisprudence. Just because Google is huge, it should not be allowed to change the law.

Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt has argued the “fair use” provision in copyright law allows Google to scan copyrighted books and put them on their Web site without seeking permission. He compares this to someone at home taping a television show and watching it later. Taped TV show are watched in millions of households every night and is quite legal; rebroadcasting that show to make a buck is not.

Next time Dr. Schmidt watches television, he should keep his ears open for the common disclaimer “rebroadcast of this program without the express written consent of” the broadcaster is “prohibited.” Google’s plans are tantamount to the same thing, profiting from someone else’s work without permission. It isn’t up to the broadcaster to track down someone profiting from their work, why should it be up to publishers and authors to do so?

Has anyone ever watched the TV Guide Channel? What’s their business model? Provide snippets about copyrighted work and make money by surrounding it with their advertising.

Ever read a book review in a newspaper or magazine? Don’t they provide an extended snippet about the work and make money by advertising nearby the article?

What’s Roger Ebert do for a career? Give snippets of movies while his employer gets paid by surrounding the snippets with advertising.

Is Google fundamentally changing the law by providing snippets of copyrighted material and making money by advertising nearby? Can anyone explain how Google Print it fundamentally different than these examples I’ve given?

Google envisions a world in which all content is free; and of course, it controls the portal through which Internet user’s access that content. It would completely devalue everyone else’s property and massively increase the value of its own.

I think Google’s vision is where all content is searchable. This is actually Microsoft, Yahoo!, and a ton of other companies’ visions as well. Google just seems to be leading the pack at the current moment.

The underlying assumption is that this is a zero sum game…if Google’s making the money from providing the book search, then publishers and authors are losing money. I think that such a service actually stands to create more wealth for authors. I’ll bet that authors whose books don’t show up on the NY Times top 100 bestsellers would love to have a more accessible way to circumvent the gatekeepers and let people find their work and what it’s about.

I have copyrighted work indexed by Google in the form of this web page and my papers I’ve published. I’m happy that people have a means of finding my work. It helps market my work by allowing interested people to find it.

The company contends it will allow authors of copyrighted works to “opt-out” of the free online library by notifying Google they don’t want their works online. Most authors and publishers do not know who bought their books. And have you ever tried to get a live person on the phone at an Internet company?

This is silly…do they really think that Google will ignore such requests? Have they tried the system? Doesn’t seem like it…seems like they’re just trying to scare people. The current search engine system (not just Google) operates on an opt-out policy for copyrighted material (i.e., web pages). For example, if you search for a topic on this blog, you’ll see that we’ve specified a policy where our work can be indexed, but not archived in Google’s cache. If the whole Internet was forced to operate on an opt-in policy, it would be impossible to find anything and people would only opt-in to a couple of the largest search engines, thereby centralizing knowledge.