Open Access News

If there was any point of agreement between publishers, authors and Google in a debate Thursday night over the giant Web company's program to digitize the collections of major libraries and allow users to search them online, it seemed to be this: Information does not necessarily want to be free. Rather, the parties agreed, information wants to be found....The debate on Thursday, part of the "Live From the New York Public Library" program, was the first time the various parties had faced off publicly. Allan Adler, a vice president for legal and governmental affairs at the Association of American Publishers, argued that Google's primary purpose in creating the Book Search service was to promote its arsenal of search engines, the main source of the company's $5 billion in expected revenues this year. "We're talking about a pretty straightforward copyright scenario," Mr. Adler said. "If they are going to directly promote it through the use of valuable content, intellectual property created by others, those others should at least have the right to be able to have permission asked, if not to be able also to share in the revenue." Google, however, maintains that it needs to scan a whole book for its search engine to work. Successful searches will return only three to five lines of text, which the company says constitutes a "fair use," allowed under copyright law. David Drummond, Google's general counsel, said the company's service allowed users to find books that are in libraries but no longer in bookstores, and that would otherwise go undiscovered by most potential readers. Mr. Adler and Nick Taylor, president of the Authors Guild, which is also suing Google, made several pointed references to Google's status as a for-profit company. "The issue here is indeed control," Mr. Taylor said. "It is the appropriation of material that they don't own for a purpose that is, however altruistic and lofty and wonderful, nevertheless a commercial enterprise." Mr. Drummond replied to the criticism: "There's this notion it can't be a commercial use to be a fair use. That is wrong."...

If Google is allowed to go down this path unfettered, [Adler] added, copyright holders will have no way to stop others who want to do the same thing, perhaps with greater financial harm to authors and publishers. "I guess to us that suggests not much faith in the copyright law," Mr. Drummond said. "It seems to us, the moment anyone starts to do things that have an actual harm, copyright law is very well designed to deal with that. It is hard to understand exactly what is the harm." Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and the founder of the university's Center for Internet and Society, also raised the question of harm. He drew a distinction between publishers and music companies, which in their Internet-related lawsuits were able to show that they were defending themselves against the losses caused by the illegal copying and sharing of music. "What you want to do is to get a kind of revenue that right now you don't get at all," Professor Lessig said. "So it's about taking part of the value that's created here" by Google, "not about protecting yourself against losses as produced by this new technology." Mr. Adler said Google's contention that its search program might somehow increase sales of books was speculation at best. "When people make inquiries using Google's search engine and they come up with references to books, they are just as likely to come to this fine institution to look up those references as they are to buy them," he said, referring to the Public Library. To which Google's Mr. Drummond replied, "Horrors."

(PS: I continue to be fascinated by the fact that publishers claim harm without being able to point to any, even when pressed.)