Google Bowing to Pressure of Paid Content

Google is the poster child for those who want to claim that free content is the future and that everyone has to give away what they produce to court “eyeballs” and the advertising they can generate. So why is it that in a number of ways, the company has recently been turning its back on literal free market theory? Is it that management has become inexplicably dumb? No, it’s because that executives at Google have always pushed to get what they can for free but realize that ultimately paying nothing may not be a workable business strategy.

Link to my BNET story about Google

Google Books Expands to Magazines

Scanning paper is scanning paper, so there should be little surprise that Google has already moved past just books and gone into magazines. (Thanks to Randy Hecht for pointing this out to me yesterday.) As I write this, there seem to be just under 90 titles available, including many that you've heard of. The number of issues varies. For example, in one case I noticed that the most recent issue was a year old, whereas for Popular Science, up to March 2009 was scanned in, going back to only 2000. Various issues of Mother Jones from the 1970s up through 2000 appeared, though not the whole run and nothing more recent.

That makes me wonder whether the magazine publishers have even known that this was going on. Remember that the book publishers were taken by surprise. As I understand copyright, depending on what permissions publishers may or may not have given, the question of whether anyone owes money to writers can be pretty confusing. National Geographic has been successful in arguing that reproductions on CDs of actual pages of past magazines are an extension of the original publishing, and so may be covered under the rights they licensed, even if writers or photographers granted only limited rights. Would inclusion in such a format also be governed? I have no idea. I know offhand that a number of the titles have never asked for all rights, exclusive or not.

And what if the publishers didn't know? Are we going to see another class action suit? Will any of the writers' organizations get involved? Will anyone other than the publishers have standing to sue? I see a lot of questions and few clear answers.

HP Competes with Google on Books - Only Smarter

Hewlett-Packard, which, aside from PCs, is a giant in imaging, is taking on Google on the book front and has thrown the gauntlet down via a partnership with the University of Michigan, one of Google's most important partners in its online book offering, because it has one of the great academic research libraries. First, check the story I wrote at BNET for the details. I really do think that HP has outsmarted Google on its own territory.

That's the view from the business and tech front, but let's consider what this means for writers. Remember that there's still wrangling over negotiations on the class action suit by writers and publishers. (I opted out, considering it a bad deal, so don't have a direct personal stake in it.) The HP announcement would seem likely to have a big impact on how the discussions are going:

• Google is going to point to this as proof that there is competition and that it's not closing things off.


• The writers and publishers should argue that the HP deal shows that there's no need to grab rights going forward.


• The judge might well see the HP deal as proof that handing over rights to so-called orphaned works (still in copyright but the rights holder difficult to ascertain or find) is bad from a market view because it would provide a sanctioned advantage to one company over another.

My short take, for whatever it's worth, is that the HP entry is going to do more to kill the rights grab than almost anything else that could have happened. On the balance, the argument becomes that there's no need for a special deal and that Google or any other company can clearly go into business looking at public domain works and that they don't need to have an extraordinary access to the intellectual property rights of individuals or organizations.

Furthermore, this gives Google a competitive kick in the rear. Since HP is doing it, why not Xerox, which is also big in imaging? Why not Amazon? IBM? It's a case where more is merrier, at least for those of us who own book rights. In fact, I'm wondering why some of the organized writers groups don't do something equal to HP's tactics. Instead of protesting, often long after the horse is out of the barn, some activity, create something practical instead. How about partnering with an Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Xerox or someone who might have the wherewithal to create a competing service. Think of it as an iUniverse that is actually effective - able to store scanned or reproduced books, create paper copies on demand, take and fulfill orders, split revenues. Negotiate with a few and use that as leverage to get a better deal out of one, rather than getting tied into an Amazon "you can have 35 percent" deal. That would be real activism, because it could be effective and makes the market system work for writers, rather than the other way around.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng user designkryt.

Round-Up of Google Book Settlement Criticism

The Department of Justice is showing increasing interest in the settlement between Google, book publishers, and the Authors Guild. And the way debate is shaping up in the publishing community, what had seemed a PR stroke of genius for Google — make use of copyrighted material, wait to get sued, settle, and seem like a hero — seems more likely to turn into an expensive and messy public black eye.

At BNET Media, I have a short summary of the issues.

Aftermarket Journalism

I posted something on BNET that I thought readers of this blog might find interesting:

I’ve heard many people insist that the future of traditional news media is to work with aggregators like Google, because they represent a new model of delivering the news. Recently, I noticed a blog post by Jeff Jarvis, which was about the auto industry. Although it may seem off-topic on first thought, it actually isn’t, and the flaws in his argument about cars explain the underlying problem with the “embrace Google” argument.

Rest of the article

Check Google Books for Your Out of Print Titles

As you probably remember, Google settled the lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and some publishers over Google Books, which displays up to 20% of the contents of out of print books online. Now you can sign up. Some notes:

• To be eligible, your work must be in their system.


• A full book gets you $60 plus the majority of revenue from ads placed around the display of the book.


• An "insert" gets paid only part of a fee. The definition of an insert is "any text and other material, such as forewords, essays, poems, quotations, letters, song lyrics, children’s Book illustrations, sheet music, charts, and graphs, if independently protected by U.S. copyright, contained in a Book, a government work or a public domain book published on or before January 5, 2009 and, if U.S. works, registered (alone or as part of another work) with the U.S. Copyright Office. Inserts do not include pictorial content (except for children’s Book illustrations), or any public domain or government works."


• If you want, you can also opt out of the settlement or file an objection or indicate that you plan to be at the fairness hearing, but you'd have to do it by May 5, 2009.


• Claims have to be filed by January 5, 2010.

Time to go check for your name and what might be up on the system. I just found out that the ASJA Guide to Freelance Writing, for which I suuppled the business planning chapter when I was still a member of the organization, is on there, so I'll be filing my claim, after thoroughly reviewing the settlement itself.

But if you do plan to get your little chunk of change, check the dates - if interested parties can file objections by May 5, there is the possibility that the settlement could be challenged. In any case, clearly no one is going to see any money until some time next year at the soonest.

New Google Search Capability

Google apparently has started heavily providing semantic searching. In a semantic search, a computer must understand how to put information into various contexts to answer questions. And Google is now doing a lot more of that has been apparent before. For example, the link above shows a search for "what is the captial city of oregon?" and the answer:

Now, if you searched for the terms "capital" and "oregon", you'd come up with Salem. What's noteable here, and suggestive of future power, is that the information is framed in such a way as to explicitly answer your question.

This doesn't work regardless of your syntax. I tried the search phrase "what is the capital of oregon?" and got some very different search results. So clearly you have to include enough information in the query so Google can "understand" the type sof relationships you're looking for. But this could be useful.

Big Landmine in Google Agreement

The New York Times ran a story about how the settlement among Google, publishers, and the Authors Guild of the class action suit over scanning and indexing copyrighted books includes the ability to sell e-book versions of out-of-print titles. There is a huge problem here: publishers generally have no rights to books that went out-of-print. For a full explanation, please see my blog at BNET, where I just posted at length about the issue. I'm no lawyer, but I see the potential of another blow-up should some class members object - and I can see how many might object. Heck, I might add my name to an objection this time. I think the potential for this to become another debacle as happened with the class action lawsuit over magazine articles in databases is pretty strong.

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.