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Google co-founder Sergey Brin lashed out at critics of Google’s Book Search settlement with authors and publishers, arguing that no other company or organization has stepped up to offer to scan the millions of out-of-print books and make them available to users.
Google Book Search is the search engine giant’s proposed settlement with the Author’s Guild and Association of American Publishers to scan millions of books online and offer them to people for fees, with authors and publishers receiving the bulk of licensing revenues. The deal, announced one year ago this month, would settle a class-action lawsuit going back to 2005, but has been bogged down in a New York district court.
Nearly 400 parties have filed positions on the matter, with the majority of them opposing the deal for various reasons. The Department of Justice expressed concerns about the agreement’s treatment of book licensing rights and myriad other issues. Privacy advocates, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, fear Google’s Book Search system will not adequately protect data on users’ reading habits.
Rivals such as Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft oppose the deal because they fear it will give Google too much control over orphan works, those books whose authors are unknown or cannot be found.
Brin, who is also Google’s president of technology, addressed all of these concerns in an op-ed published in the New York Times Oct. 8. It was a rare move for Brin, who like co-founder Larry Page prefers to steer clear from public speaking and let Google CEO Eric Schmidt serve as the company’s top spokesman.
Brin argued against the claims that Google Book Search is a compulsory license, noting that rights holders can set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google at any time. He was sympathetic to concerns about user privacy, noting that Google has created a privacy policy specifically for Google Book Search.
Brin also sarcastically disputed the notion that the deal stunted competition or limited consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. He wrote:
““In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice-fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.”“
Brin Blasts Anti-competitive Arguments
Brin continued:
““I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort. But despite a number of important digitization efforts to date (Google has even helped fund others, including some by the Library of Congress), none have been at a comparable scale, simply because no one else has chosen to invest the requisite resources. At least one such service will have to exist if there are ever to be one hundred.”“
In this respect, Brin expanded on what he told reporters Oct. 7 while he was in New York with Schmidt. During a 90-minute roundtable with press at Google’s New York office, Brin said the companies that are complaining about out-of-print books-Amazon and Microsoft-are doing nothing for them.
After reading that comment, Internet Archive co-founder Brewster Kahle wrote that his group opposed Google Book Search because it disrupted orphan works legislation that had passed one house in Congress.
“If Google were to abandon its attempt to grab these books for its own private gain, then technology companies and libraries could speak with a strong voice, speaking in unison, working together to get proper legislation passed,” Kahle wrote.
However, Brin in his op-ed argued that if Google’s proposal passes muster with the court and regulators, others-and legislation-will follow. Brin wrote:
““And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions. While new projects will not immediately have the same rights to orphan works, the agreement will be a beacon of compromise in case of a similar lawsuit, and it will serve as a precedent for orphan works legislation, which Google has always supported and will continue to support.”“
Brin’s op-ed was published one day after Google, authors and publishers convened with New York District Judge Denny Chin to discuss amendments to the proposal. Chin ordered the parties to present the revamped deal to the court Nov. 9.
Read more coverage of Brin’s op-ed on TechMeme here.