Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for�January 2006
Gosh, I love radio. You learn the most surprising things. A few weeks ago I was asked to appear on our local NPR station to discuss Google Book Search (née�Google Print). Doesn’t take much to get a ham like me on the air, so I readily agreed. And what company I was with!
They started with Pat Schroeder, former congresswoman, now head of the Association of American Publishers—she of the�“we have a very serious issue with librarians”�Washington Post�quote: “One library buys one of their journals. They give it to other libraries. They’ll give it to others.” Yeah, that’d be bad.
On this show she made the point that Google’s library program was digitizing works that are under copyright, without permission of the copyright holders. Google says it is only going to provide snippets or fragments of those works in response to searches, but who’s to say what future purposes might be found for those digital copies? She also pointed out that the libraries involved are getting those complete digital copies as well—what is going to happen to those?
She came off in a “What about the children?” sort of way, and actually said that you can’t trust billion-dollar corporations like Google to keep their word (unlike, presumably, the membership of her organization). Still, she raised some important points.
Next came a Google lawyer. I found this most extraordinary since the firm normally doesn’t make extensive public commentary on most issues, so I was very interested to hear what he had to say. He made the fair-use argument several times, and claimed that the outcome of Google Book Search would be to increase access to works that otherwise might be ignored or unfound. Ultimately, he maintained, that access would result in greater use and sales of those works.
In response to a question about sharing Google’s advertising revenue with authors and publishers, the lawyer also (in jest? ironically?) suggested that perhaps they should pay�to be included. Really.
My turn. As I said on the show, as I see it they’re both right, and they’re both wrong. Spoken like a true academic, I know. It seems likely that having these materials readily searchable would indeed increase awareness of them, as well as the desire to get at them in some form.
For libraries in general, this could be a terrific boon for business; many of these works will be out of print or otherwise difficult to purchase, so it’s possible that lots of interlibrary loan requests would result. It could also easily mean increased sales in many cases.
Of course, sometimes the single snippet or page is all that’s needed, so the Google search itself (or a buy-by-the-page scheme such as the one recently announced by Random House)(AL,�Dec., p. 16) would suffice.
At the same time, it also seems a huge stretch for a corporation such as Google to be claiming fair use, which is normally associated with noncommercial uses of copyrighted material. Potentially valuable as this service is, if Google can prevail in its fair-use argument, as Schroeder said, and can copy stuff at a whim, why can’t everybody else?
Google’s collective instincts do seem, in general, to follow its corporate mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and its mantra, which is “Don’t be evil.” On this one, though, the firm just doesn’t seem to be hearing the concerns—quite legitimate and very serious ones—from the publishers and authors who ultimately make the service possible.
So why is that? Arrogance? Maybe—Google’s plenty big enough, but that doesn’t seem to fit. The company needs a little while longer to dominate the market before becoming truly insufferable. Naïvete? A more likely possibility. It’s a big company now, with grown-ups and everything, and this time it’s up against the incomprehensively torturous copyright laws, where mortals dare not tread. Yet naïvete doesn’t seem to quite capture it either.
I’d characterize Google’s angle instead as innocence. To me, it feels as though the firm honestly believes this program would be a net boon to humanity—and doesn’t understand why everyone else doesn’t understand that and want to play along. If that’s the case, it would be truly refreshing and even a little sweet.
Will Google Book Search ultimately succeed? Quite possibly. Should it? I’ll take the Fifth on that one. Most important, is there a copyright-friendly model that would foster that success? Likely not, wherein lies the rub . . . but that’s another story.