Cory Doctorow on ...everything. "Internet ?rapshoot: How Internet Gatekeepers Stifle Progress" http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=178058&print=yes
[Includes a little light reading on the Google Books Settlement. See you all next Saturday at MCN 2009.] Take the Authors Guild, a tiny organization representing a few" thousand American writers, whose deep pockets and shrill voices give them the spotlight whenever they claim it on behalf of all working writers. The AG recently made headlines by suing Google over that company?s Book Search program, a system that set out to scan and index every book ever published, making it as easy to search the written word as it is to search the Web. Google proposed to serve up its search results in the same manner as it serves up any other Web results, by providing a snippet of text and a reference to the original book, along with information on buying it, should it happen to be in print. What's not to like? Well, plenty, if you're the Authors Guild. They brought a class-action lawsuit against Google alleging that making an intermediate copy of a copyrighted book (a scan) was a copyright infringement (they also suggested that serving up a search result was a similar infringement). This is a pretty dumb legal theory. If it?s true, then every search engine is a massive copyright infringer, because the intermediate copies they make of billions of Web pages (just as likely to be copyrighted as the books in the library) are not substantially different from copies of books. Further, the search results are not particularly different (from a copyright perspective) from search results comprised of snippets from Web pages. The Authors Guild asked to have their class certified as representing every author published in America -- living, dead, or unborn. Once a court certified this class, they could negotiate a deal with Google, and Google would get the right to scan books and make them available under the terms of the deal. Certifying such a broad class should be difficult -- not least because any defendant in such a case should be able to point out to the judge that 8,000 writers comprise a tiny minority of all book authors in the past and future of America. But Google cannily did not object to the certification. After all, the AG would likely ask for a pricetag that Google could afford. And it's unlikely that future competitors of Google would be able to negotiate with such a class, even if they could afford to. Once the Book Search settlement was announced, writers around the world were astounded to discover that an arrogant cabal of D.C. insiders presumed to strike a deal on their behalf. These writers are up in arms and won't ever let something like this happen again. So the AG got a settlement out of Google -- or rather, Google got a settlement out of the AG. For a price that Google can handily afford, its business model is now definitively legal, and any competitors that try to move in on Google will be stuck playing by the system that Google devised, with Google itself elevated to most favored nation. So rather than guaranteeing a future in which dozens of companies compete to see who could offer the best terms to writers, the Authors Guild just raised the cost of entering Google's book-search market to infinity. Nice going, Authors Guild." ... ________________________________________
