Google Settlement, More Thoughts

Yesterday, I finally got around to listening to the Beyond The Book podcast of an interview with Michael Healy about the Google Book Settlement.

Healy is the current executive director of the Book Industy Study Group and has been tagged as the executive director of the to-be-extablished Book Rights Registry, assuming the courts and the US Department of Justice finally approve the Google Settlement.

The podcast is disappointing … for several reasons:

Very light on specifics

Dwelled excessively on “orphan works“

Only softball questions from Christopher Kenneally (of the Copyright Clearance Center)

By concentrating the discussion on the “orphan works” red herring, both the interviewer and Healy managed to ignore the bigger issues with the Google Settlement. The issue that really angers me is that this settlement gives Google a free ride with no penalty worth mentioning for having routinely violated copyright on innumerable books since they began massive sanning operation in 2004.

Oh, and the fact that all authors and publishers have been forced to opt-out to avoid being lumped into the outcome of a lawsuit in which we had no voice and no choice.

In the interview, Healy makes the following statements:

• The settlement provides the opportunity for “authors and publishers to express what Google and others do with these digitized books, the display rights, the pricing, etc.” (Of course, the right way for Google to have done this would have been to ASK permission BEFORE scanning the books!)
• Both supporters and opponents can agree that this is a “complex agreement and the settlement documentation is itself, long and complex.” (And therein lies another problem — the complexity means nobody can really know how it’s all going to play out in the end. Be afraid, kids, be very afraid. Google is certainly no known for respecting the IP rights of anyone in their quest for profits.)
• “for the first time, it’s going to give readers, researchers easy access to millions of out-of-print books.” (Remember, folks, the settlement says a book will be deemd “out-of-print” if it is “not commercially available,” and a book available only through POD avenues may be deemed NOT commercially available — read pg 59 of the settlement agreement.)
• “the settlement agreement is breathing new life into out of print books and leaving completely alone the existing market for in print books online.”  (It doesn’t read that way to me — the settlement allows Google to create a lot of, mostly unspecified, commercial uses of scanned books. And, don’t forget, remaining in the settlement forces all disputes into mandatory arbitration rather than leaving open the possibility of further lawsuits.)
• “[the Book Rights Registry] introduces into the environment a new organization, which is really determined to give an unprecedented degree of control for authors, publishers, and others, rights holders, on how their copyrights are exploited and distributed in this new digital world.” (I think he chose the correct word – “exploited” — which is what Google has been doing for five years already. In fact, however, rights holders are relinquishing a lot of control to an as-yet-unknown entity — the BRR. How much control do you think small, or self, published authors are really going to have over the actions and decisions of the BRR? After all, it is the large publishers — members of the AAP — who have been behind this lousy settlement from the git-go.)

You will have to make your own decision regarding whether to remain in the Google Settlement or to opt-out of it (and that raises another major issue — this should have been strictly an opt-IN settlement!!!).

If you want to trust Google and some pie-in-the-sky Book Rights Registry with your intellectual property, be my guest. I’m sure you’ll make millions out of it.

Sure you will.