Throwing the Book at Google

Looks like Google's grand project to digitize and archive every book in the field of human knowledge is running into more problems. The plan, known as Google Book Search, seems entirely noble at first glance: Google will gradually catalogue and make available every book published in history, in cooperation with some of the world's largest university libraries. But as people began to scrutinize the project, they grew more and more concerned. In particular, the Authors Guild, which represents some 8,000 writers, worried that Google was planning to make available books that had faded out of print but were still protected under copyright law without compensating the authors who labored so hard to produce them. The Guild filed a class action lawsuit to protect its members' interests, and the two parties reached a revenue-sharing agreement last fall; a judge has yet to approve the settlement.

Since then, more and more critics have emerged to denounce the deal as essentially handing a monopoly on almost the entire body of human knowledge over to Google (GOOG). It all boils down to the cost of getting into the business of archiving the world's literature, which, as you might imagine, is a little more than the retail price of an Android phone. The class action settlement only applies to Google, giving it an exclusive arrangement with the Authors Guild; if any other rivals try to set up a similar archive, the Guild could sue them, and they are not likely to have Google's resources to litigate and stay in the game. Which leaves Google as the only organization equipped to digitize and ultimately control distribution of human knowledge.

Robert Darnton, the head of the Harvard University library system, has already articulated many of these concerns in the New York Review of Books, and you can read a summary of his complaints here. In essence, he argues that Google's idealistic founders will die someday, and their heirs could easily be considerably more mercenary. Now, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization dedicated to digitally archiving, yes, human knowledge, has joined the fray, filing an objection to the settlement. Echoing Darnton, the Archive argues that the settlement gives Google exclusive immunity to future copyright lawsuits, leaving competitors at a fatal disadvantage.

As New York Times reporter Miguel Helft explains, at issue are the so-called "orphan books," or books that are still protected by copyright but have been out of print so long that the authors or their estates have vanished. If these authors and heirs resurface and demand a piece of the royalties from Google, they're covered by the settlement with the Authors Guild. But if they sue Google's rivals, no one knows what sort of damages they could get, and copyright infringement can incur some serious penalties. Unless the Authors Guild settlement extends to everyone seeking to archive literature, the potential cost of future lawsuits will prohibit anyone except Google to get into the business, leaving Google free to do whatever it wants with the corpus of wisdom generated since 1923, the cutoff date for copyright protection.

Pamela Samuelson, a UC-Berkeley law professor and director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, has joined the fight on the side of the Internet Archive, arguing that allowing the settlement's terms to apply to everyone will insure that Google won't be able to monopolize digitalized literature. The judge in this case will accept similar complaints until May 5, after which he is expected to issue a ruling. At stake is ... well, almost everything, really. How weird is that?