While on the subject of writers potentially getting raw deals, another more popular story has been making the rounds today with everybody’s favorite search engine. Well, maybe not everybody. At least not the Authors Guild.

Yesterday the Authors Guild filed a lawsuit to try and stop Google Print. In another surprising step of using their blog to address a pending lawsuit, Google’s Vice President of Product Management, Susan Wojcicki writes:

We regret that this group chose to sue us over a program that will make millions of books more discoverable to the world — especially since any copyright holder can exclude their books from the program. What’s more, many of Google Print’s chief beneficiaries will be authors whose backlist, out of print and lightly marketed new titles will be suggested to countless readers who wouldn’t have found them otherwise.

Wow! What used to be a boring, read once in a great while rah-rah corporate blog, is starting to sizzle. Kudos to Google for finally starting to use the medium that they bought into long ago as something other than a PR door mat.

As for the subject at hand, the basic beef the Authors Guild seems to have, assuming I understand this correctly, is that Google is putting the entire contents of books up for search, so that people who might be looking for a specific title/subject will more easily be able to find it. The Author’s Guild is upset that the authors aren’t being paid for the information being searched. Google’s take is, hey, some of this stuff is out of print so we are helping folks find books that they can go out and find (where? Used book stores? eBay?). Authors don’t make any money from books sold via eBay, in garage sales or in used book stores (unless the books were purchased new by the book store, of course). I’m missing where the authors are getting screwed on making the content of their book searchable. Again, if that’s the beef.

So I started reading what others were writing about this situation. From Search Engine Journal I learned that the Authors Guild filed a class action suit in Manhattan federal court for “unauthorized scanning an copying of books.” Unfortunately no link to the Authors Guild complaint or quotes directly there. I kept researching.

Tim O’Reilly, a publisher, sides with Google on this one:

That’s precisely why Google’s opt-out position is exactly the right one. If we were to wait for publishers to opt in, only current, in print works would get into the index. With opt out, the interests of the public, the authors, and the publishers are all protected. The public gets an amazing utility, the ability to find which books contain the desired information as easily as they can now find web content; readers, authors and publishers all get a windfall as search helps people find books that are currently completely ignored by both publishers and retailers.

From a publisher perspective, who lives and dies by book sales, I can see why Mr. O’Reilly feels this way. But there is a bigger picture to consider.

Nathan from Inside Google writes:¹: “Seems like we’ve seen very recently the two sides of Google: The one that obsessively wants to collect information on the end user, privacy be damned, and the one that obsessively wants to collect the world’s information, copyright be damned.”

Does Google care about copyright? It seems by them offering an exclusion program, the copyright owner can exclude his/her works from the program and therefore bypass being scanned. I do find it very Hmm worthy though that their exclusiong process is almost intentionally anal:

If you are a current Google Print publisher, you can simply upload a list of the books you don’t want in Google Print. This tells us which books to avoid when scanning.

This sounds painless and easy, but wait, it gets better (emphasis mine):

But please be aware that once you set this up, you can’t remove books from the list — only add them. If you change your mind and want to submit the book at a later time, you may have to send us a copy or upload the PDF. We may not be able to go back and find books we have skipped during the digitization process.

Google “may not be able” to find books they have skipped during the digitization process? How can a company which specializes in — which bases their core business on — search not be able to find something? That’s easily the most ludicrous part of this whole story.

Lastly, I stopped by the Authors Guild website. Go to the horses mouth, whenever possible to get the true information. The rest of us out here talking about it may be completely misinformed and clueless. It was at the official Authors Guild site that I found the following press release (which many articles and bloggers didn’t link to): Authors Guild Sues Google, Citing “Massive Copyright Infringement”²

“This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law,” said Authors Guild president Nick Taylor. “It’s not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.”

The Authors Guild represents some 8,000 published authors and the press release bills them as: “… the nation’s largest and oldest society of published authors and the leading writers’ advocate for fair compensation, effective copyright protection, and free expression.”

So in one corner is the search engine giant, Google, claiming to be for the people, sharing information open and freely, and in the other is the venerable Authors Guild claiming to be a writers’ advocate for “fair compensation. effective copyright protection and free expression.”

Who will the courts favor in this decision? It will be interesting to see this one unfold. I’d put my money on the Authors Guild at this point even though they seem like the underdog. Google seriously needs to refine their system and make it easier and more copyright owner friendly. If they do that then they can say they are for the people, until then, it looks to me like this is another program where they can slot their contextual ads in the future and avoid sharing payment with the creators of the work.

We’ll see what the courts have to say. If it even gets that far. What do you think will happen on this one?

1. 11/25/08 original link broken, site appears offline. Wayback Machine cache [↩]
2. 11/25/08: link changed to WBM cache, as original link was no longer valid. [↩]

Did this post make you go hmm?

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