Google Books Settlement – Bad News for Billionaire Looters
on August 18th, 2011The Google Books Nightmare. Read all about it here:
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.
The case has been winding its way through the courts for years. And it looks bad for poor Google. A recent court case has probably killed any chance of a settlement. The Department of Justice has repeatedly kicked this one back already.
New York Law School’s James Grimmelmann didn’t mince words. “The Google Books settlement—any settlement—is now dead,” he noted. “There is no square one: this case is going back to litigation.”
Review the famous Tasini case. Tasini is also involved in the recent fight against multi-millionaire moocher Ariana Huffington, whose sale of The Huffington Post netted her a cool $315 million, and her team of unpaid bloggers…well, lots of unpaid.
The seven-justice majority opinion penned by Justice Ginsburg found that “[b]oth the print publishers and the electronic publishers … have infringed the copyrights of the freelance authors.” In the end, the court concluded “that the Electronic Publishers infringed the Authors’ copyrights by reproducing and distributing the Articles in a manner not authorized by the Authors and not privileged by sec. 201(c). We further conclude that the Print Publishers infringed the Authors’ copyrights by authorizing the Electronic Publishers to place the Articles in the Databases and by aiding the Electronic Publishers in that endeavor.”
I’m thinking this may be one of the (many) reasons people are turning from blogging to link sharing activities like Twitter. You can still get your point across without a lot of labor, share your info or ideas, and not make some uber-blogger rich off your hours of effort. A 140 character tweet is a lot less effort than a blog post.
This is just the beginning. People are seeing the techies make all the money and treating the art/writing labor like dirt.
They’re beginning to see why the techies are so anxious to get ahold of content. As much of it as they can for free, by convincing as many people as possible that they’re going to make them famous. The only value is in code. There’s no value in 0′s and 1′s, I mean art. Or writing. Or journalism.
Without content, code is just a bunch of numbers.
Huffpo even nominated one of these unpaid bloggers for a Pulitzer, but when that blogger came asking for a paycheck, they told her her work wasn’t worth money.
Worth a Pulitzer, but not worth money.
Pull the other one.
I think a lot of people who do want to blog — ie, write something longer than a Twitter post — have realized that doing it for free on a “traffic” site like the HuffPo has ended up not serving them very well, and are going back to maintaining their own blogs/sites, and driving traffic via Twitter.
Although a friend of mine started writing a column for the HuffPo after the sale. I haven’t asked her yet if she’s getting paid for it – I hope she is.
That’s what I’m seeing, too.
I’ve only been on Twitter a short time (couple of weeks) and already I have over 800 followers. Twitter also brings in more traffic to me than any other source, including Google.
I see NO reason to blog for free on a regular basis for anyone but yourself. Biggest scam ever. Free content for the major blog, and nothing for you.
I tracked one of those anti-creator rights bloggers on a tech site for six months. Big proponent of blogging for others, then hoping the fame rubs off. His site has ten followers, his twitter only a dozen.
The same holds true for every one of his ilk I’ve followed.
All these people are doing is bloating the content of big name blogs. It’s easy for these big name blogs to profit from that content, but the readership almost never follows the content provider.
Fame doesn’t rub off.
I’m sure most people know this BUT:
By bloating the content, what I mean is, even content that doesn’t have much value by itself has value in the aggregate. Lots of key words and images drive traffic. All those people blogging and posting stuff, even if it’s crap, will be of value to a site like Huffpo.
I took screen shots of the traffic of a website which has a lot of low value celebrity blogging content. Posts were shallow, no more than a paragraph or two, designed to target keywords. Almost always accompanied by images which would drive searches. You know, celebrities and twaddle.
The bounce rate on that site was way over 80 %, which means 80% of people came in, looked at one thing and left. The vast majority of those readers were brought in NOT by original content, but via Google images. That is, people looking for pictures.
So, some of these review sites and blog sites that people seem to think have a high readership? They don’t. What they have is traffic driven by casual readers searching for stuff on Google, finding one image or key word, sticking around for 5 seconds, and leaving.
The vast majority of those bloggers provide the kind of content which gets the advertiser click. And they have such a huge database of crap that they are right at the top of the search engines. And as long as they can convince bloggers to pop in and do the blog work to get “famous” then they can keep driving that worthless content traffic that brings in advertiser dough without adding any value to anything else.
I used to wonder why some comics blogs had such a reputation for clout without actually having any solid readership. How could I go on Twitter and in two weeks have almost as many followers as bloggers who’ve been at it for years?
The answer is that many of these bloggers DON’T have real readership bases. They have CLICKS to content, but no loyal readership. People don’t come to their blogs because they really like the content, they come to their blogs because there are lots of keywords and images in the database.
It’s a shallow readership base, as opposed to the real readership that brings in fans.
This site has a low bounce rate and a readership that reads many pages. A comics review site has a high bounce rate, and a readership that came to look for one thing, left, and probably never came back.
Huffpo and other blog sites depend on the same business model, but on a much larger scale. They just throw so much crap at the internet they glut the market and fly to the top of the search engine.
So, even though my site may have fewer individuals coming in and reading the content, the readership is REAL. The people who come here are more likely to stick around and buy something.
Which is why many webcomics with higher readerships are not doing as well financially as this site. My readership is more dedicated to the content of this site, and more likely to buy art and books.
Hey! Who you calling shallow? }]
Actually, when searching, I don’t even visit the sites… I click on the Google cache, which highlights the words I’m looking for. A quick scroll, scan, then I decide if it’s worth a direct look. Shallow? More like subterranean!
The same is usually true for Google Image searching.
On Google News, it’s the sources. Either a major news source, or a local station or newspaper.
I have a blogger account, with Google AdSense. Nothing much posted there, because it’s easier to post to Facebook, or I type up something for Comicsbeat. Even when I post a link on Facebook to either site, I don’t get much traffic.
Twitter, I have an account, but it’s easier to just post everything to Facebook. Google Plus gets some posts, but that’s because I have subject specific circles I’d like to share information with (and because IT hasn’t blocked it yet, so I can post URLs a lot easier).
While your art is faboo, I prefer to read the comic in book form. So I visit mostly for the marvelous content (and because you are tolerant and forgiving of stupid things I say here). We really should organize and get you nominated for an Eisner for Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism.
Wow, Torsten that is incredibly kind of you.
And if we all got nailed for every time we were boneheads online, none of us would ever be allowed online again, not least, me!