Department of Justice REJECTS Google Book Settlement
on March 22nd, 2011I wrote about it here, here, and here. I object strongly to the Google Book Scheme. Nice idea, very bad execution, particularly the part which gave Google exclusive rights and privileges over every other publisher on the planet without any input from authors whatsoever.
For a paltry settlement of $60 per book, Google claimed digital publishing rights with or without author consent as a part of a 300 page settlement with 200 pages of amendments, written in such a way as to virtually guarantee that almost any author would not see their $60 for…well, goodness knows when. The contract was a NET agreement.
Everyone I ever met who thought this thing was a good idea had never actually sat down to read this 500 page monster.
We were not asked prior permission to have our books scanned and placed in their database. They do this whether we want it or not. No publisher or author was asked prior to Google’s proceeding with this action.
While some publishers agreed ex post facto to give Google permission to publish large portions of our works in Book Search as well as their private database, some authors like me have not given publishers permission to extend to Google that right…
The fact remains that this is a rights grab: Google is forcing the digital rights issue on authors. Even if your work is in print, your publisher may make the decision to go with Google whether you are aware of the matter or not, whether your contract covers this matter or not.
Google is scanning commercially available books. They are posted when they are determined to be out of print, and Google becomes your new digital publisher for a fat chunk of the take.
The Department of Justice today ruled AGAINST the Google Book Scheme Settlement which would have made almost all authors automatically subject to this lousy publishing agreement, including Print On Demand services for your books entirely on Google’s terms. Read it all.
“As the United States and other objectors have noted, many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA were converted from an opt-out settlement to an opt-in settlement. I urge the parties to consider revising the ASA accordingly.”
Everyone who did not sign a document opting out of the settlement is automatically included. And people like Terry Moore of Strangers in Paradise is just one of many creators who signed the opt-out document only to find 80% of their catalogue of work in Google’s system. The fine print in the 500 page Document of Doom gave Google nearly a year to remove any works improperly included, and also gave Google the right to keep their portion of any profits from the commercial exploitation of that work, regardless.
Chin also said the ASA went beyond the pleadings in granting Google permission to sell full access to copyrighted works that it otherwise would have no right to exploit. The ASA would give Google this authority “even though Google engaged in wholesale, blatant copying, without first obtaining copyright permission.”
Let me repeat: the Google Book Search Scheme was sold to the public as an open source reference library for out-of-print works – a boon to researchers, scientists, scholars.
That was false. The Google Scheme included ALL books, and made a grab for commercial exploitation rights. Under some of the worst contract terms I have ever read in my life.
Great day. Ah, I love spring.
Great going!
Keep up the fight!
Yay for DoJ! Thank you!
And boo (again) at Google for the Greedy Grab!
If anyone’s interested in what I, as a former Googler, think is a reasonable take on Google’s initial internal mindset when Google Books started, I recommend http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2011/03/google-goes-electric.html
It’s by Doug Edwards, Google’s then head of marketing, so it’s both an internal to Google and external to Engineering perspective. I did do some work with Doug (oddly enough, one thing that stands out is when both of us reacted to a proposed product feature with “That is *not* going to go over well among users” and managed to persuade the team not to do it, said feature coming out of a similar mindset to what’s written about in the post) and think he’s a good and smart guy. If you’re really interested in Google, he’s got a book coming out in a few months (plugged on the blog page) which I believe is the first about the company by someone who actually did significant work at Google, particularly in the early days.
Interesting. Great blog, and thanks for pointing to it. The Dilbert story is priceless.
While Bob Dylan may have thought his audience was lying, Google is actually lying to the public about the details of the Book Search scheme. This is not about scanning obscure academic and out of print books for the benefit of the public. This is a publishing rights agreement. And it’s a lousy one.
If Google can tell me why they need romance novels in their scheme, I’d be happy to hear it, but I’m betting scientists can cure cancer without benefit of access to bodice rippers.
This contract puts every book in it in debt to Google to the tune of $200, (OK, $140 if you count for their generous $60 settlement) and sets up a deal where virtually none of the books included in the scheme will ever benefit anyone but Google.
NET means nothing.
I think there is some separation between the initiation of book scanning and the payment proposal. Consider, in addition to the mindset that Doug discussed, that 1) Google’s mission statement, from the beginning, is to organize the world’s information. From that perspective, a book is a book, namely a container of information. Google indexes a lot of web pages that aren’t going to cure cancer and are more ephemeral in that regard than a romance novel. 2) Again particularly back then, Google’s corporate culture was to do *big* projects. A standard engineer interview question was “What would you do with access to a *lot* of machines and data? OK, more than that, that’s not a *lot* around here. OK, more than that…” (for quite a while, outsiders didn’t know even within an order or two of magnitude just how big the dataset was or how many machines were used). The point of the question was to weed out folk who weren’t thinking big and imaginatively.
So, combining those two with the attitude described in Doug’s post, and you can see how it probably went from “There’s information in books not on the Web” to “We could scan in books to get their information into searchable form” to “If we do that, our goal should be to scan in every book, ever”; think *big* and get all the info was considered the right thing to do.
The payment proposal definitely had problems. On the other hand, I do hope something comes out of all this with respect to some way of fairly, for both creators and consumers, dealing with “orphan works”. Given the ever increasing length of copyright (I forget; when’s Disney due to start advocating for another extension because Mickey Mouse is getting close to starting to go public domain?) and difficulty finding the copyright holder for generally no longer particular commercial works, I’d like a fair way of being able to access such.