Google has been hit with a lawsuit for copyright infringement, stemming from its effort to scan several library's worth of books to make them searchable online. It had offered authors an "opt-out" option.

Here's some more detail from Bill Rosenblatt's DRM Watch.

I will venture a prediction: I expect this one will settle.

My first thought is that the publicity that they would get from being part of a readily searchable library would be good opportunity for some obscure authors (that is why I expect it will settle). (Personally, I would be content to have the books that I have edited included). (In a very limited sense we already have searchable libraries; I use Amazon's book search function that way. It doesn't post the text but in a lot of cases one can get a general sense of the book's content from reviews). But for popular works, or works where the authors actually expect to derive income from sales, well, Google's project wouldn't be so welcome. And for art books with color illustrations or photographs, well, the publishers would in general not be so pleased. Graphics cost a LOT to print.

Here are some point by point comparisons with the music biz, just off the cuff:

--likelihood that a downloaded copy would satisfy the user (i.e. substitute for a sale):

Music: high-medium; the experience of listening to a downloaded copy is satisfactory.
Books: lower; many people won't fancy printing out a novel, or reading it on screen. But for nonfiction sources, being able to search text and cut and paste bits might well substitute for a sale.

--likelihood that a download will inspire a sale:
Music: lower, since the experience of listening to a downloaded copy is satsifactory, and one can unbundle "good" songs from the rest of an album that way.
Books: somewhat higher, though not for really bad ones (I would never have bought that appallingly badly researched and not at all footnoted tome on the history of Indian law if I had got a look inside it).

But I am not sure where all of this leads. A colleague of mine mentioned that he thought Google's "opt-out" plan was reasonable, given that they are just one entity, and highly public; it would not be too burdensome to send them a note. But I am concerned that this is not generalizable.

Bottom line, as I see it, the authors are in the right here, but Google ought to be able to negotiate reasonable terms, and gladly--if the service they are planning to provide has enormous potential value, why not pass on some to the authors? Everyone would win.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 8:09 AM | Books

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