Is the Open Content Alliance too corporate?
I’m a bit reluctant to report news exclusively from one source, but I’ve just found a number of interesting stories on TechCrunch to which I will soon be linking. Several of them involve Apple, Google, and AT&T’s responses to the FCC over the Google Voice app rejection matter.
But first, here is an interesting editorial about the Google Books settlement by Paul Carr, who makes it quite clear that he has strong opinions and is going to express them. Carr sums up the history of the Authors Guild lawsuit and settlement, then talks about the Open Content Alliance that is opposing it.
The OCA, it should be noted, has a number of noncommercial members—including libraries, universities, and net-archivist group the Internet Archive. However, it also has Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon—two of these Google’s biggest commercial rivals and the third a business with a substantial interest in pushing its own e-books—whose talk about how “content” should be “open” does seem to ring just a little hollow doesn’t it?
The heart of Carr’s argument is this:
All of which leads me to the real question that needs to be asked this week: what on earth are the Internet Archive and Gary Reback and the libraries, universities and other legitimate members of the Open Content Alliance thinking?
The stated aims of the Alliance - to ‘build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material’ - are solid, and their position that Google’s legal immunity over orphaned works should be extended to all is laudable. But by palling around with anti-trust terrorists, self-interested champions of DRM and conflict-funded law schools, they’re undermining all of that by making themselves look like corporate shills.
Carr suggests Archive.org and other noncommercial interests should get out of bed with Microsoft and Yahoo and instead put their energy into lobbying for copyright reform—working with Google to make that happen, instead of against them.
I think Carr makes a good point. Whether the Google Books settlement is fair to authors is one thing. But when you think about it, it looks awfully suspicious for Google’s biggest competitors to come out self-righteously swinging against Google for doing something they would be just as ardently defending if they were doing it themselves.
August 24th, 2009 at 10:49 am
I took the article to mean that Google deserves a monopoly on access to the world’s knowledge because 1) the author doesn’t like Microsoft or Amazon, and 2) Google has spent a lot of money developing that monopoly. Not a very convincing argument.