Boondoggle in Google Rights Win? (Warning, Rant)

Google has finally settled a two-year-old law suit filed by the Authors Guild and five publishers. The topic? Infringed rights, of course, coming out of the company's scanning millions of library books and making them available for search. The plaintiff argument was that this was a new use of entire copyrighted works without permission.

Google is paying $125 million (making the settlement over unregistered magazine works seem like petty cash). Someone or other is supposed to establish a books rights registry, allowing people to view books in whole or in part and then enabling payment, whether from Google or the readers is unclear to me at the moment, to the rights holders. However, I'm a bit suspicious because $30 million of this settlement is going to setting up this registry.

I thought that there were at least two existing registries, one set up by the NWU and another by some combination of the Authors Guild, ASJA, and possibly others. And even if there weren't, $30 million to set this up? You could fairly comfortably fund a start-up high tech company for that period of time and get it running. This is very serious money. What the hell is it being spent on? This isn't someone else's money, folks. It's probably partly your money, if you write books. What transparency will there be in this new registry? Where is all the money going? Is Google doing all the tech work? (In which case, the $30 million becomes normal cost of doing business and hardly a win for anyone other than Google.)

By the way, this was also clearly a strategic win ... for Google. Going forward, people will buy books they want online and libraries will pay for access. Who gets 37 percent of the revenue? Google. Plus, there's advertising revenue and Google gets the same percentage of that. So for $125 million, it's probably nailed down many, many times more future revenue. This will turn out to be a pretty cheap business acquisition for them. That means the publishers and the AG have, through this negotiation, validated in a practical sense the business model of taking intellectual property of writers, making money off it, and then, if enough writers and publishers scream loudly enough, giving in just enough to keep what you established. Why should a company go this route? Because the publishers and writers are so determined to keep anyone from prying rights out of their hands that they aren't actively considering and pushing for new business models. In that view, this "victory" is completely Pyrrhic.