The Google Book Deal

This is a little bit dated, but a while ago I was asked to give my thoughts for a small missions books publisher about the recent Google book settlement. (As background, Google was sued for copyright violations by a consortium of book publishers because it has been scanning and making available online portions of books, or complete books.) I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this as having any legal weight, but here are a few wild speculations that might be interesting:

One big problem in the publishing industry is trying to figure out who owns the copyright to what. There must be tens of thousands of copyright owners, and companies that own copyrights are started and go out of business with great regularity, and people die, and who owns the rights to what is often very mysterious. Google wanted to digitize all the books and publications it can get its hands on, but tracking down all the copyright holders to get permission from each one would have been a continuing nightmare.

So - and this may be my imagination, but I'm tempted to see a grand design by Google - Google executes this plan:

First, it does something that some would say is of dubious legality by digitizing in-copyright publications. This, of course, ticked-off the copyright owners, who generally have no more cohesion than a herd of cats, and forced them to band together to fight for their interests.

Ah-ha! Google has now forced its legal opponents to form a single, unified group. Now Google only has one organization to bargain with instead of tens of thousands of mostly-unknown copyright holders. Nightmare solved!

Google then seals a deal with the copyright-holders group, thereby covering itself legally and opening new business possibilities (such as putting ads on the pages of the digitized books). But since the basic legal issue (whether Google was within the law by digitizing the books) remains undecided, this would appear to mean that any competitors who want to copy Google's digitizing plan will have to overcome these legal hurdles on their own.

Also, and I think most importantly for society and the publishing industry, the deal creates an independent, nonprofit organization tentatively called "The Registry," which will represent copyright holders in their relations with Google. The Registry is being given the task (among other things) of keeping track of the contact information for the rights owners and doing business deals for their benefit with Google.

Wow! This registry could be a very positive thing. It could facilitate publishers and authors contacting copyright holders to obtain permission to excerpt or reprint their works. Wedded to the Internet, it could be the basis for a "Permissions Marketplace," where copyright holders could offer a license to their works for sale at whatever price they choose. People could simply pay the price online and use the material without any further fuss. I think this could be a big boon to publishers in general.