Print
Comment
Email
RSS
Twitter
Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass
Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass
Posted Friday, October 9, 2009 - 2:00pm
At least it's an exotic experience. How many times have you had a man worth billions work so hard to whip out his Google, leak on your leg, and swear to God it's raining?
Today, Sergey Brin does his best to sell you the snake-oil that his Google Book Search project is an undiluted good for the world, all those annoying monopoly worries aside. In an op-ed piece for the New York Times, the Google (GOOG) cofounder pimps out his best messiah impersonation, promises that he and Larry have your best interests at heart, and gets all weepy that anyone might not trust his baby with control over the digital archive of all human knowledge. We knew this piece was coming, because he hinted at it in Wednesday's presser at Google's New York office. But this is an astonishingly fatuous argument. If this is all Google's got, don't expect the feds to green-light the book settlement deal.
Brin starts with hundreds of words dedicated to how generous Google is to have scanned books that would otherwise rot in such obscure libraries as Harvard, Oxford, and the University of California campuses. Yes, we get it, Sergey: It's a lot easier to read them online than leaving the house and walking around the stacks. And yes, you've guaranteed that a massive conflagration won't wipe out the last copy of some Ph.D.'s commentary on Dante's Purgatorio. Thanks for all that.
But a Xerox machine could make the same boast; we don't give it the right to exclusively negotiate royalties with authors who may not even know their works are being reproduced. Even though Google didn't set out to hold a monopoly on millions of books, that's what it ultimately tried to acquire. And Brin's effort to minimize the barriers his rivals face to replicate Google's archive is just insulting.
Consider this remark, for example: "Nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort." Thanks to quirks in civil litigation and class-action law, Google has lucked into being able to negotiate royalties with every single author and copyright holder on the planet. No one else will be remotely able to do the same thing. Before they can scan any book printed after 1923, they'll have to find the copyright holder and ask nicely. Characterizing this as just a walk in the park can't be seen as anyone other than a deliberate attempt to sucker the public into letting Google have a monopoly on millions of digitally archived books.
Here's another gem: "Despite a number of important digitization efforts to date (Google has even helped fund others, including some by the Library of Congress), none have been at a comparable scale, simply because no one else has chosen to invest the requisite resources." "Chosen" is a nice way to put it, we guess. Brin and Page are sitting on $19 billion in cash. Not accounts payable or stock they could convert—cash money. The Internet Archive or the Library of Congress don't have the "requisite resources" to find every writer and ask permission to preserve their books for posterity. Frankly, neither does Google. It just lucked into a class-action lawsuit that lets it pretend as if it already has.
Again, we're thrilled that Google has done the heavy lifting and saved human knowledge in the event of a natural disaster. We're sure graduate students everywhere will thrill to the prospect of reading first drafts of Henry Miller erotica or something. But knowledge is a public trust, and deciding who should effectively be the only repository of it is a question that deserves more than Brin's facile sales pitch.
Comments
GOOGLE
I am glad to have GOOGLE Book Search at my finger tips. Would you rather see it in the hands of Microsoft or At&T?
I'm with David
This article was snide, ignorant, and without substance.
I spent a lot of time around Google in the early days of Book Search, and I can confirm that it was indeed driven by the idealism that Sergey describes. What's more, when Sergey says "no one else wanted to step up to the plate," he wasn't talking about the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress, but about Microsoft and Yahoo!, both of whom started digitization efforts just because Google was doing it, but soon realized that the expected revenues would likely never repay their investment. Google continued not because they wanted to get a monopoly on electronic access to out of print books, but because they are a mission driven company. "Access to all the world's information" means something to them.
Yes, they are a business, and they may well eventually figure out how to make money on Google Books, but like many other Google projects, that's a long term investment. They also want to make it possible to translate automatically from one language into another, to recognize human speech more effectively than anyone has been able to do in the past, and many other long range, visionary tasks consistent with their mission. They built Google Earth and Google Mars as well as Google Earth not because they thought it would make them lots of money but because they thought it would further the world's access to knowledge.
They know that in their business, you never know what will be valuable, and so they are willing to invest in "access to all the world's information" in a far reaching way that others are not. That's a GOOD thing.
Then along come these idiots from the Author's Guild and Association of American Publishers, and sue them for doing what they've always done on the web: make a copy of people's copyrighted content for the purposes of generating an index, and showing only snippets from that index so that people can discover what knowledge is in what books. The AG and AAP end up pushing this idea of a settlement that gives THEM (not Google) - specifically, a "Books Rights Registry" that they control - power over the collection and distribution of royalties from Google Book Search.
And Google is the evil monopolist?
But the worst part of this is that the author doesn't even seem to understand the basic structure of the Google Book Search offering.
1. If the book is in copyright and in print, it is in Google Book Search only by permission of the rights holder. If a book is in the service, and a copyright holder comes forward, they can take it out at any time. They also have the right to put it into any competing service, if such a thing exists.
2. Works that have no known copyright holder - the so-called "orphan works" - have a great opportunity through Google Book Search to be discovered. Many orphan works aren't really orphaned - their publishers (or authors and their heirs) just don't think they are valuable enough to pay attention to - to go back through their files and make sure they actually have the rights. If Google starts making money on GBS, suddenly there's an incentive to figure out who has the rights. At that point, books migrate to category 1 above. The owner can take them out, license them to others, etc.
In short, what Google gets is a "monopoly" over the works that are left - i.e. the ones that are not worth enough for anyone to care about, or that no-one truly has a claim on. This is truly the slushpile of history. This is stuff that no one (except scholars) thinks is valuable. And given that Google will have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create that database, seems to me that they would have as good a claim as any to it at that point. But even then, under the settlement, a big chunk of money is put into escrow (under the control of the BRR, which is in turn controlled by the AG and AAP) just in case anyone comes forward.
In short, if you want to find any evil monopolists in this story, look to the AG and AAP, who almost certainly don't represent the class of authors who are hidden in the Orphan Works category, but have managed to inject themselves into Google's business, carving a third of any possible revenues off the top despite having done nothing to earn it but to sue Google.
Please, before writing a passionate op-ed like this, do some homework.