“I wish they would just die, because I so detest how they’re exploiting the web.” That’s Dave Winer writing today about his reaction to Google’s use of its toolbar to manipulate the content of web pages. Google’s shareholders probably have a very different view of the company at the moment, as the Internet Goliath just announced a sevenfold increase in profits during the last quarter, pushing its stock price up sharply.
But the irascible Winer is not the only one complaining about Google’s increasing control over who sees what on the web when – and where the resulting money flows. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has just joined the Authors Guild in suing Google over its ongoing effort to scan the world’s books into its vast database and serve up their pages as search results. John Battelle, author of a new book about Google, yesterday dismissed the lawsuit as a reactionary move – “their legacy business model is imperiled, and they fear change” – but today, after speaking with the AAP, he changed his tune a bit: “Google is doing this so as to make its own index superior, and to gain competitive advantage over others. That leaves a bad taste in the publisher’s mouths.”
As a book author and blog writer, I have mixed feelings about Google’s power. On the one hand, a good case can be made that Google is making commercial use of people’s intellectual property without fully compensating – or even informing – them. (I realized only today that it has scanned my book into its database and is serving it up in five-page chunks. No one told me.) On the other hand, I know that if my content wasn’t in Google’s database, traffic to my site would dry up, and I might – though I’m not sure about this – lose out on a few book sales. And, beyond my own petty interests, effective searching lies at the heart of the web’s value. Disrupting the status quo could have nasty consequences. Whether I like it or not, I work for Google.
The stakes here could get very high. Kevin Werbach argues today that the “battle” between Google and the publishers could pose a “challenge to the stability of the Internet as we know it.” That’s because it brings to the surface some tough copyright issues that have long been submerged. As Werbach writes, “On some level, copying a Web page to facilitate searching isn’t all that different from copying a book to facilitate searching. And copying an RSS feed to put content onto another site isn’t so different either. Unravel the notion that some content sharing benefits everyone, and therefore should be acceptable despite the nominal boundaries of intellectual property, and the Internet economy, especially the Web 2.0 economy, comes crashing down.”
It is a little scary, but so is an increasingly contentious, and arguably unfair, status quo. It may be that the conflict will stir up some constructive, innovative ways to compensate content creators for the intellectual property used by Google and other companies. Perhaps a rights organization, like ASCAP in the music world, could be established to track the use of online content, collect reasonable fees and funnel a bit of money back to the creators. Or maybe, as Winer suggests, the best solution lies in simply adopting an opt-in model for many search-related services. As a first step toward a just resolution of the issue, it would be helpful if Google stopped acting as though it’s doing the Lord’s work and anyone standing in its way is a benighted Luddite. Just because you do no evil doesn’t mean you do good.
While your quote is accurate, it misrepresents what I said, and missed an important fact — I am a Google shareholder. I bought the stock on the IPO and hold it. However they are not the little company we used to love. That’s the gist of what I said.
Dave Winer is right: what if 20 companies index a book I wrote, am I suppose to OPT OUT each time? Google will run ads and lift the value of their search index in the process. Giving publishers/authors the option of OPTING IN gives them more say over their work.
That is why it’s good to use other search engines (search.yahoo.com , http://www.ask.com) so google’s market share goes down. Having mutiple viable search engines is good for everyone.
It sounds more like an issue of greed than IP.
Dave Winer: Yes, you’re right. I’ve modified the second sentence to be clearer about the context of your quote.
“…I know that if my content wasn’t in Google’s database, traffic to my site would dry up,…”
and the “Ads by Goooooogle” would become pointless ;-)
When I go in Barnes and Nobles and I ask a question for a book, do those that answers own you some money ?
(and I can tell you I can read more than 5 pages there …)
The general rule of thumb is that most books published after 1923 are still in copyright. It may be appropriate to require some sort of opt-in for books currently in print, but if opt-in is required for nearly a century’s worth of printed material, it’s clear that the vast majority of books (Google estimates 85%) will never make it into the system. Goodbye long tail. Who benefits there?
Doug: If a book is in copyright, then someone owns that copyright and can give permission for Google to index the book.
If nobody owns the copyright, then the book is…not in copyright…and we don’t even need to have this discussion.
I don’t see how you changed it, and you still say that Google shareholders have a different view from mine (how do you know), and it’s obviously false, since I write from the perspective of a Google shareholder.
You know there was a hope at some point that bloggers would be more interested in telling accurate stories than projecting their own opinions on other people, but I guess not.
Thanks for these comments. I think they show the complexities of the issue only deepen as you get further into it. Maybe any cure would be worse than the disease. Anyway, some responses:
Clark: Greed’s always there, but I think in this case it’s really more about IP. Under even the most generous compensation scheme you might imagine, the ultimate payments to the vast majority of individual authors would be small, if not minuscule.
Jean-Philippe: Your bookstore point is a valid one, though there are differences, of course. (There are no print and save buttons in bookstores, for instance.) As to the Ads by Google box, since it’s been generating average daily revenues of 53 cents for me, I’d say it’s pretty pointless to begin with.
Doug Lay: As you point out, it’s true that, even given DensityDuck’s point, a lot of books would go unscanned if you shift to an opt-in model (the root of that problem lies in our Mickey Mouse copyright laws), and that would certainly reduce the value of the index for the general public. On the other hand, I don’t think there’s be any legal basis for distinguishing between in-print copyrighted works and out-of-print copyrighted works, so I’m not sure that’s even possible. Therefore, you’re still left with having to deal with the rights of copyright holders, which may trump the benefit to the masses – I mean, isn’t that tradeoff inherent in the notion of copyright to begin with?
Dave Winer: I’m sorry, but I sincerely think you’re a bit off base here. First, if you want to distance yourself from what you wrote yesterday, that’s up to you. I’m just reporting on what you said (and supplying a link to the original text, which I think is important and I hope people do read in full). Second, in your editorial you didn’t mention you were a Google shareholder, so it seems a little unfair to blame me for not mentioning it. Anyway, it’s irrelevant to the fairly obvious point I was making. I was simply comparing your (pretty darn sharp) criticism to what the general feeling among shareholders likely was last night. I very much doubt that, when the stock jumped 7 percent, the average shareholder was deep in a funk about opt-in protocols. Third, you’re right that I can’t “know” what the feelings of the shareholders are; I can only speculate. That’s why I included the word “probably.” Finally, since I’m genuinely unsure of what my opinion is on this whole matter, it would be hard for me to project that opinion on any one or any thing. I do appreciate your comments, though.
More Carr: on Google Print
While we’re looking at Carr’s Rough Type, yesterday’s post is on the Google controversy:…
Jean-Philippe noted that “There are no print and save buttons in bookstores, for instance.” No, but there are in public libraries.
Stupid suggestion for Google. . . who dont it split a % of its paid search revenues to the x# of natural search results that appear on the same page as the click through? Google recognizes the value that an adsense affiliate brings (ie traffic) it should also recognize the value of the content creator as well . . .
Google Print, Fair Use, and Doing Evil
You think Google will try this with movies and music? Somehow I have my doubts, which raises a few questions about the current project in my mind.
you may enjoy my post below on Google pricing and ethics. Here’s an intriguing thought – at this point Google has copious data on what is on every user’s minds as they type in key words. How much could they make packaging that data, not just clicking you to destination pages?
http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2005/10/evil_google.html#
Tomorrow the Open Content Alliance is hosting a reception in San Francisco. It has been promoted by Brewster Kahle and others and could be seen as a more collaborative digital publishing effort than Google’s. Kahle’s Internet Achive has, of course, been working on this sort of access to more and more content (both print, video, and electronic) for years.
http://www.opencontentalliance.org/
There’s little to see here regarding the most publicized issue – that Google will derive economic benefit from indexing books. This hardly makes the use illegal in itself. Is Google taking an economic benefit that should belong to the copyright holders? Hardly, unless all the copyright holders intend to publish web-based indices to their works. (A separate index for each work wouldn’t be very useful anyway; one would want some way of searching all of these separate indices, i.e., a search engine.)
An issue that I do think has some real meat to it has been raised in a comment to a Wall Street Journal article on Google Print. Google apparently intends to compensate the participating libraries at least in part by giving them the digital scans of their holdings. The commenter points out that receiving payment (whether in money or trade) for digital copies is a right of the copyright holder.
Copyright Property ‘rights’ were solely created to benefit the masses, so they can’t trump the benefit of the masses.
You have to argue that the benefit of the masses of preventing this use through increased incentive to create works, trumps the benefit of the searching.
That is an argument you lose.
So this should be allowed as fair use. If we find that the law does not currently allow it, the law needs to be changed.
According to the info posted on Google’s blog, ads will NOT be included next to book search results except with explicit publisher / author permission. This is something that nearly all critics of Google’s stances on this either fail to realize or at least fail to note.
Nick:
The ONLY way your book would end up having full-page chunks being searchable is if your publisher OPTED YOU IN to the “Google Publisher Program.” Google only shows small snippets of a page is they have not received permission from the publisher to show more. Your beef with you book ending up showing so much is with them, not Google.
source: http://www.fireflySun.com/book/Google2.php
Who says Google does no evil? As evidenced by the screen captures and e-mails in the above link, Google is complicit with cyberstalking gangs using unmoderated Usenet news groups as a base of operations from which to vandalize the results of Google Web searches on the names of their victims.
Google offers prominent access to these news groups under its own branding, even going as far as to refer to Usenet as “Google Groups.” But someone asks Google to remove a threatening message revealing non-public residential and contact info about a victim (usually the only accurate information in the libelous dossiers), Google complains that it is not Usenet, that it does not have the resources to manage the news groups, and offering up the acknowledgment that Usenet is by nature vile. In one response, Google threatened that if I compelled them legally to edit their group archives of Usenet, Google would refer me to an ememies-of-free-speech web site for blacklisting (i.e. chillingeffects).
Google instructed me to take the matter of high ranking defamatory Usenet messages up with the news readers (i.e. the metastasizing group of web sites that provide access to these news groups and archive its messages to the web so they are accessible to search engines). But now it would appear Google has decided to archive these news group messages to Google Web Search directly (i.e. message URLs begin with “groups.google.com …”).
So not only is Google evil, but it would appear Google is well aware it is evil. And I have been alerted to a movement by some complainants to gather info about Google employees (freely available from their blogs) and use it to give Google employees a taste of their own medicine. While I do not condone using some info about the families of these employees, it does happen to many victims of stalking that originates from Usenet and Google (most notably the unmoderated sci.psychology.psychotherapy), and Google turns a blind eye.
The issue here is Google’s Dr. Frankenstein-like approach to the business of search. Perhaps a more appropriate metaphor would be Google’s pathological hoarding / raiding of the cosmos.
One rule of business, ethics, and business ethics: limit the scope of your product to what you can manage / monitor through customer service. Google complains that it lacks the staff to attend to all the stalking and defamation coming out of the news groups (i.e. Usenet). And yet Google does have the time and staff to scan God knows how many books from 5 of the largest public libraries.
Google took Usenet public. Thanks to Google, Usenet can no longer lay claim to its fashionably grunge moniker “the Internet Underground,” which once catered exclusively to teen hackers trading their principals’ credit card numbers, evangelical pagans, and other creeps jockeying for pole position as public enemy #1.
Now the only thing that remains underground are the identities of the hackers, stalkers, and flamers (and some hacking trade secrets concerning the use of anonymous remailers, forged headers, and bulletproof posting services to keep these gangs ‘mostly unidentifiable).
These are the news groups you have Google to thank for:
alt.hackers.malicious
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hackers.malicious?hl=en
sci.psychology.psychotherapy
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.psychology.psychotherapy?lnk=lr&hl=en
alt.usenet.kooks
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.usenet.kooks?lnk=lr&hl=en
alt.brad.jesness.die.die.die
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.brad.jesness.die.die.die?hl=en
[last two URLs removed as they incorporated