Google CEO to critics: What would you have us do?
In an interview with Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, Google CEO Eric Schmidt expressed frustration with the criticisms the Google Books settlement has received from all corners. He cites the years of negotiation with 27 separate parties that Google went through to come up with the current settlement, and the lack of alternative solutions offered by critics.
“I would like to hear from the critics a better solution to the problem as opposed to criticisms of the solution that we arrived at after four years of negotiation,” [Schmidt] said. “I read this stuff, and it strikes me that people who only criticize have as their interest the current status quo.”
CNet claims that Bloomberg reports that Google, a group of the lawsuit plaintiffs, and the Justice Department are now in talks concerning possible modifications to the settlement. However, the Bloomberg story (which has been amended three times as of this writing) currently shows nothing of the sort.
Google has already amended the settlement to institute a privacy policy and to state that books in print in Europe will be considered to be in print by Google Books too. But these changes have done little to quell the growing discontent.
I wonder what, if anything, Google can do to address the complaints. No matter what they do, they will not please everyone. As it is right now, the vocal opponents clearly seem to outnumber the vocal supporters.
September 17th, 2009 at 2:44 am
Will not please anyone or will not please everyone? I’m pleased. I love the idea of Google Books and the criticism comes from people who hold copyright law up on a pedestal and are unable to fathom a world in which authors have less control over the distribution of their work. I think it’s very narrow minded and the irony is that if pirates choose, your work will be distributed to anyone who has no moral qualms with breaking a law that is about on par with speeding. Google Books has done more for ebooks than the efforts of most companies trying to break into the scene. Google has not put a lot of effort into formatting, editing metadata, and fixing OCR errors but they’ve done the brunt of the work. They’ve set up the groundwork and Google can choose to either have people help with the editing of their existing digital texts or they can do the work themselves if they want Google Books to be commercially successful. Either way, it’s a fantastic effort. Book Search was a great tool until paranoid publishers looking only to protect their own monetary interests (not that of their authors) worked to cripple Google’s effort by limiting what Google could legally show. It’s sad. Google offered a tremendous service to society and all anyone can do is offer up narrow criticisms concerning monetary reward even though there’s no correlation and Book Search would have probably helped sell MORE books.
September 17th, 2009 at 3:19 am
Should have been “everyone”. It’s late at night. Fixed now.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:02 am
The more I read, the more I’m coming around to appreciating the settlement. I think Schmidt’s comments are spot on. The criticisms I’ve seen, rarely suggest alternatives that would calm the waters. Like I said in previous comments, there are a few parts of the settlement that seem like bad policy on their face. As its written, the terms of the settlement don’t really encourage Google to actually find rights holders, and I’d like to see more of an effort (even an automated one) to do so. That said, with the amount of press this has been getting, you’d have to be a pretty reclusive rights holder to not take a moment or two to see if your out of print book is affected.
It benefits nobody to lock away previously published, out of print books for the duration of their copyright. While the settlement is far from perfect, it is the first time we have an organization with the resources and motivation to make access to these works a reality. If nothing else, it forces the issue at a policy making level, and if you’re forward looking enough to see the landscape five or ten years down the road, when a majority of people will do their reading by electronic means, it’s an issue we absolutely need to deal with.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:41 am
A lot of copyright owners are adamant about keeping control of their work because the U.S. Constitution specifically gives them the exclusive right to do so. I suppose a building squatter might think that property owners can be overly diligent about protecting their rights, as well.
One change I’d like to see in the settlement is for Google to give up the monopoly on the digital distribution of orphaned works. The settlement contravenes copyright law by requiring the owners of orphan works to opt out. That’s like me saying I intend to profitably develop a nation full of apparently abandoned lakeshore properties unless the owners find me in time and tell me I can’t. Current law holds that somebody owns those orphaned works — the owners are just hard to find. Their work is not public property.
September 17th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Google may wish otherwise, but it should absolutely be their responsibility to contact any and every book owner about a book to publish… not the other way around. And a failure to find such an owner should not be a blanket OK to publish the book, it needs to have the proper documenting to the authorities that the effort has been honestly made. It really is that simple.
True, all of that is a lot of work. But it is still work that ought to be done, to be fair to all parties. Google needs to step up and wear out some shoe leather, just like any other entity that wants to get something done over someone else’s rights. They have to go and ask first.
September 17th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I agree with Steve, although I look at it more as a risk system. The risk of not finding the author should be on Google, so if the author later turns up and was clearly findable, Google may have to write a real and meaningful check to that author to make up for the unauthorized use.
As for property squatters, there actually is a parallel in real-property. The notion of “adverse possession,” stands for the proposition that if you squat on someone’s property, they can find you, evict you, and charge you damages for the use… but if you squat long enough, and the squatting is ‘open and notorious’ (i.e. the owner obviously should have known about it), the property eventually becomes yours. It’s based on the idea that using property is better than not using it, and while the owner of property gets to decide what to do with it, if they’re not even going to bother giving the boot to a squatter for say 15 years, they’ll lose it.
September 17th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Rich: It is a little bit ironic that the operator of BlackMask.com tried to use the Doctrine of Adverse Possession to defend his illicit posting of the Shadow and Doc Savage novels as e-books. Now Google’s settlement essentially lets them do the same thing.
Google’s republication basically is going to be “open and notorious” and the onus is going to be on the property-owner to find out and “evict” Google. That’s the way it should be.
There are countless stories out there of people spending weeks or months and hundreds of dollars unsuccessfully trying to find the owner of just one out-of-print book. It’s ridiculous.
If the authors (or their descendants) care so much about their precious little darlings, they should darned well be keeping track of things that could affect them (so they can ask Google to pull their books if they want).
And it’s not as if what Google Books is doing hasn’t been shouted from the heavens for the last four years. Google’s foundation is even going to keep the money they make from those out-of-print books in escrow so that the authors can claim their allotted portion down the road if they do find out about it late.
September 17th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
The real pity of this whole mess, it seems to me, is that Congress has made such a hash out of the copyright laws. This has left some pretty gaping holes, patched and unpatched and repatched. In particular the issue of orphan works is something that Congress simply won’t fix.
It all stands as a stark warning of what is going to happen when copyright is eternal (minus one day) and we are all vigorously watched in our digital lives. One misstep and we are digitally excommunicated.
The culture will founder with massive gaps and black holes, filled surreptitiously by the samizdats of the pirates, until the whole edifice comes crumbling down, one way or another. In the meantime some works will be lost.
Many works were lost when the classical age ended. That was only one of the many cultural hecatombs mankind has experienced. The same story will repeat itself with us.
September 17th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I disagree there. A squatter isn’t “in the right” to squat just because they haven’t been found out. According to the law, they are supposed to ask. They can be fined or jailed for squatting, because it is against the law.
If a squatter walked up to a cop and said, “Excuse me, but I’m going to be squatting in that house over there, okay?” You better believe that cop is going to tell him, “No, you’re not, and if you do, you’ll be squatting in the station-house.” Google is trying the same thing, and trying to convince the cop to say, “Yeah, sure, have a nice night.”
Letting Google get away with squatting until they get caught, when you know they’re squatting at the beginning, is a subversion of the intent of law.
September 17th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
If we’ve reached the stage of Google whining then it would seam there is in fact enough meat behind the issues brought up that Schmidt is starting to sweat.
Which is only good and proper; the only chance the “settlement”/takeover had of going through was to sneak unnoticed past government copyright regulators and the recent notices to the US Congress have pretty much put an end to that hope.
I rather like the squatter analogy because Google is in effect confiscating private property that the so-called “Author’s Guild” (anybody remember the original function of Guilds, btw?) has no title to nor right to represent. The only organization with the proper authority to negotiate any such *new* copyright regime in the US (to say nothing of the entire world) is the Congress and even they would be bound by the existing copyright treaties which it seems the google gang seem to have “conveniently” forgotten until called on it. For a major corporation with a horde of lawyers such an “oversight” is simply disingenuous.
Also of note: In the US, the taking of private property for public use (to say nothing of Private/for-profit use) is by law regulated by emminent-domain principles and those principles are not being observed in this end-run on copyright law. Those principles are constitutionally protected under the due-process clause, among others, so I suspect the “settlement” is going down in flames and real soon now.
September 17th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Steve,
Yes, they might be violating the law by squatting, but the doctrine of Adverse Possession explicitly applies to squatters who by definition does not ask.
That being said, as I have argued elsewhere, the current copyright system needs to be overhauled. The current laws are based on notions of how media worked long before the internet was developed. Certainly the style of copyright that was set up by the Berne Convention is totally unsuited to the needs of the internet age. Not only are the length of copyright term (IMHO) excessive, but essentially it makes it virtually impossible to republish some works — people move, die, etc, and without any requirement for the copyright to be registered and to have that registration renewed fairly frequently, it can become awfully difficult to track down the appropriate holder of a copyright 50 years after the work was published.
Personally, I think many of these problems could be resolved if we restored the requirement that a copyright be registered and that that the registration be renewed periodically up to a maximum period of time. If copyrights had to renewed say every 10 years, then orphaned works would enter the public domain within 10 years of their being orphaned. Many authors would have little incentive to renew copyrights on works that were no longer in print and it would be much easier to determine when works enter the public domain (After all, it is not always clear when a particular author has died or if they are even still alive). Ultimately, using online tools all of this could be done fairly easily and cheaply.
–
Bill
September 17th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
“As it is right now, the vocal opponents clearly seem to outnumber the vocal supporters.”
Complains have been very well covered by the press indeed.
And at the same time thanks to high-quality journalism, very few everyday Internet users apart from tech news readers are aware of what’s going on and what’s at stake.
Some people should have read Chris’ comment before spitting out shallow arguments all over again.
Abide by private property rights, rather than value the global outcome when it doesn’t even require concessions is idiotic. Yes the settlement is making use of works out of the initial copyright terms, but in a very fair way and in due respect to the copyright holder, if he/she reveals him/herself.
Then expect no access before a long time, and expect some extra fee for the extra costs you’re pushing into.
Sorry for any bitterness.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
@Elie, I realize that adding to Google’s documentary responsibilities will cost time and money. That’s no reason not to demand the job be done properly. There are concessions involved… but by the settlement’s terms, Google is the only entity absolved from making any concessions. Stealing property, even “for the public good,” is still stealing.
If I went to the government and offered to make the same effort, you’d better believe they’d make me get permission from every copyright owner, and provide documentation that I had made an effort to contact those I could not find, before I could touch any single work. All that is being asked is that Google do the same.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Quote: “I love the idea of Google Books and the criticism comes from people who hold copyright law up on a pedestal and are unable to fathom a world in which authors have less control over the distribution of their work.”
I doubt any of the critics of the settlement have trouble imagining the situation he describes. It was precisely the state of the world until the very end of the 19th century. Then, as Charles Dickens well knew, within their borders countries routinely ignored the copyright of foreign authors. The Google settlement does that and more. Unless an author living anywhere in the world formally opts out at his own time and expense, Google assumes it now (as of Sept 4) has the right to publish them in the U.S., displaying all these books at institutions like libraries for Google’s profit and part of it for free to get the support of the leaches.
The person quoted is all too typical of a ‘modern’ critic. He ascribes a psychological inadequacy where none exists. Of course, like most settlement supporters, he “loves the idea” of getting books without paying for them. Well yes, and I’d like a sporty Porsche to replace my 28-year-old Toyota, but that doesn’t give me a right to break the law no matter how rare that car is or how rarely the owner drives it.
Quote: “The real pity of this whole mess, it seems to me, is that Congress has made such a hash out of the copyright laws.” Granted, Congress is in a mess and a few hundred thousand dollars would probably buy any sort of copyright law imaginable from them. But nothing remotely similar to the settlement will pass muster with the treaties we’ve signed with almost every country on the planet. And I might add that the Europeans, who are ahead of us in this matter, aren’t coming up with solutions that remotely resemble the settlement. They require due diligence to find each individual author.
What I really find amusing are all the people who clearly have never displayed much interest in locating old and out-of-print books that now have this sudden urge to have millions of books online. Talk about a pathological psychology. It’s like two-year-olds who always want the toy the other kid has.
It’s not only quite easy to get such books, it’s getting easier all the time. WorldCat used to be the exclusive domain of librarians. It’s now on the web for all to consult. It’ll tell you where copies of the book are located. If they’re nearby you can see it for yourself. If it’s further away, your local public library can borrow a copy. Buying is even easier. Once upon a time it meant visiting a chain of used bookstores week after week for ages. Now, online databases will find you a copy in seconds.
Germany and France have already demanded that, if the settlement isn’t tossed out entirely, then their citizens must be excluded. Google better take that as a warning. With a wave of “proxy sites” in court, any country can turn Google’s online display in the U.S. into a copyright violation in their own country. That country can then level the sorts of fines that accompany deliberate copyright violation. Big, big fines that will make the people in their country very happy. In this country the press gushes about Google. In Europe they hate it.
What can Google do to make the settlement acceptable? Simple, follow the law and only display books with the author’s permission. With an opt-in only scheme, they have to actually do something to get authors to sign up.
Do you think Google has tried to inform authors about what is being done to them? Think again. To inform Japanese writers Google took out small ads for one day in two major daily newspapers and one in a trade journal for publishers. How often do you read the back pages of the LA Times, for instance, looking for someone about to grab away your copyright? I didn’t think so. And even if a few authors found out about it, Google offered no decent translation of the settlement into Japanese (think machine translation). How would you like to find out that some court in China had bound you to a contract you can’t even read? Same thing. That’s why authors outside the US are ticked off.
Keep in mind that Google’s lawyers and execs aren’t stupid. They knew from Day One that this settlement would never pass legal muster. It violates every copyright law and treaty in existence. They hoped to slip it by beneath the radar, aided by a clueless press. That failed, in part because of the four-month extension the judge granted. That’s made all the difference.
Given Google’s reaction, I suspect the judge has read some of the objections that have been filed and told Google to come up with answers or their settlement will be tossed out. And for the life of me I can’t imagine how Google can answer those objections.
So relax, the world won’t come to an end if the Google settlement is rejected. Things will just go on as they are now, which isn’t that bad.
September 18th, 2009 at 1:39 am
Comparing physical property rights to intellectual property rights is just insulting. Physical property rights exist to manage finite resources to avoid conflict. Intellectual property is not a finite resource. Ideas propagate. It’s what they do. IP laws just regulate what you’re allowed to do with your newfound knowledge. It creates scarcity rather than manages it.
Yes, I do “love the idea” of free literature but free literature, legal or not, now exists permanently. That’s not even a question. But I think Google has created a service with real value to society and all anyone can do is condemn them from robbing (a dubious claim considering Google Book Search is more likely to get people to go buy the physical book than read the whole thing online) creators and publishing companies from their dues (whatever those are). So yes, I have moral qualms with copyright, but the Google Books settlement is good for other reasons. I think it helps creators more than hurts. If I really wanted to, I could find many books I desire for free.
I don’t know if your “right to break the law” comment was because you hold the “law” in high esteem and think it’s the glue that holds society together or if you just morally agree with ALL laws. If it’s the former, then hopefully you don’t break any other laws (pretty hard to do these days–ever drive above the speed limit?). If your reason is the latter, then the comment was kind of irrelevant because the laws are something you’re inclined to agree with philosophically anyway.
An interesting comparison. The following is from Arnold Plant’s The Economic Aspects of Copyright in Books:
“This country” being England. So I guess I should say relax because the world won’t come to an end if the Google Books settlement is accepted.
September 18th, 2009 at 8:21 am
Mr. Perry,
Frankly your arguments are weak, mostly because they assume knowledge that you don’t have. Lets look at a couple of the bits you shared in your last post.
1. That posters supporting the Google Book Settlement like getting books for free. Perhaps we do, but the Google Book Settlement isn’t going to give us copyrighted books for free. Yes it will allow access to copyrighted books for free at libraries, just like the current doctrine of fair use allows. If we want a copy of the work, we have to pay for it, and ultimately, the author of the work will receive compensation for that copy (Whether the compensation is fair or not is another story, but that can be argued here).
2. That supporters of the Book Settlement have a sudden new interest in finding old out of print books. With respect, you have no idea how many hours I have spent in used book shops looking for novels that were out of print (or which I believed were out of print at the time). It took me 6 months to find a copy of Alfred Bester’s Demoslished Man (This was before Amazon).
Of course the irony here is that this is really all a tempest in a teapot. While we are worrying about the rights of authors of out of print books (i.e., books without much market demain), the Darknet is busy making sure that everything in print is available for free. The fox is in the henhouse… why are we worrying about closing the door now?
September 19th, 2009 at 5:20 am
The justice department brief is in.
Their position?
All the anti-settlement claims are correct:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10357097-265.html?tag=newsLatestHeadlinesArea.0
Most telling:
“As a threshold matter, the central difficulty that the Proposed Settlement seeks to overcome – the inaccessibility of many works due to the lack of clarity about copyright ownership and copyright status – is a matter of public, not merely private, concern. A global disposition of the rights to millions of copyrighted works is typically the kind of policy change implemented through legislation, not through a private judicial settlement,” the DOJ wrote.
Spin doctors are, naturally, hard at work but they have their work cut out from them when an Executive Branch Office tells the judiciary that an issue properly belongs to the legislative. That works out at two-to-one against the settlement.
I’m thinking of the Monty Python parrot right now…