Defending the Google Books settlement
By Paul Biba
With all the negative press that the Google Book settlement receives, it’s important to print the positive as well. This is by Quentin Hardy and appeared on Forbes.com.
I do not often feel a lot of sympathy for large monopolistic corporations, particularly when they have some history of unilateral moves. In the case of Google Books, and all the negative attention it has received over the four years this case has gone on, I might make an exception. …
If Google’s actions seem entirely wrong, consider how we would feel if, in response to all the criticism, Google simply destroyed the 10 million-volume corpus. We would feel an almost irrevocable loss.
September 26th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Actually, the coverage that the Google settlement got both in the mainstream and tech press was almost exclusively positive until the past month, when objections to the settlement poured in, particularly from big players such as Amazon and Microsoft. That was something the press couldn’t ignore and a few of them, a very few of them, actually took the time to read and consider those objections. The only exception I know of was the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which has been critical of the settlement since at least last spring.
Research it for yourself. Compare Google’s press releases with news stories from October of last year until this August. I doubt you’ll find any significant difference. I know, since May I have pounded reporters repeatedly that the settlement was a obvious and gross violation of Berne. Since I’m not an authority figure, that didn’t register until a few weeks ago when the German and French governments objected to the settlement on precisely those grounds. Once an authority figure had spoken, reporters woke up and, for a few all-too-brief moments, actually engaged in a bit of thinking. That thinking, or at least that reporting on the thinking of others, is what put the settlement in an accurate light, which happens to be a bad light.
The grossly inaccurate coverage by the U.S. press is one reason that other countries entered this debate so late. German authors had to inform their government what the settlement meant for German authors. The French came in after the Germans and, unfortunately, time ran out before authors in New Zealand and Japan could get their governments to act.
In short, Google’s spokesmen did a quite effective job of manipulating the press from October of last year until August of this year, aided by the inabilities of the Authors Guild to speak ill of a settlement that, in private, they know has serious problems. It’s just that in that last month, all their lies, evasions and half-truths fell apart. The truth came out, but only just barely. That’s what scares me most about this matter.