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Some Canadian writers of out of the Google Settlement
November 17, 2009 | 8:02 am
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By Paul Biba
The Writers’ Union of Canada had decided not to endorse the amended settlement, but the Association of Canadian Publishers and the Canadian Publishers’ Council have not taken a position yet.
The Europeans have been, on the whole, non-committal so far, except the German Boersenverein (booksellers’ association) has expressed concern about being left out – even though they previously said they didn’t want to be in.
The poor New Zealanders must really feel strange as the point of including Canada, Australia and England was that they had a similar heritage and legal system to the US. I wonder whose heritage New Zealand has?
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Comments:
It’s not New Zealand’s legal heritage that got them excluded. It’s the fact that New Zealand writers have not only expressed opposition to the settlement, they’ve managed to get their government’s attention, something far harder to do. That’s yet to happen in Australia, Canada or the UK.
I suspect that writers in the latter three still accept the propaganda that Google’s public relations team feed the U.S. media (and from the U.S. to the English-speaking world). I do know that the key to wakening up NZ writers came when a leading copyright lawyer and Internet activist discovered, about a month before the second opt-out deadline, what the agreement really meant. I know because he got in touch with me shortly afterward.
The exclusions are for countries where opposition to the settlement was strong and growing (continental Europe) or whose native-language literature is of little economic value to Google (Asia, particularly China and Japan, as well as poorer countries).
Keep in mind that, while Google may be greedy and unprincipled, as their cooperation with the Chinese government’s censorship illustrates, they are most certainly not stupid. Their lawyers are very clever and their manipulation of the press outside continental Europe has been brilliant.
Their initial scheme was to set aside for themselves and themselves alone the U.S. copyright protection (in most case provided by treaty rather than formal application) for every book published anywhere in the world since 1923. It was a stealth agenda, dependent on an unquestioning press and the fact that IP blocking would mean that writers outside the U.S. would not see their books displayed by Google. They’d remain ignorant of the fact that they were getting ripped off.
The six-month extension of the deadlines that I and six other authors persuaded the court to adopt meant that the actual extent of Google’s book grab came out and sufficient opposition developed to threaten acceptance of their original settlement. Read the pro/con filings with the court and you’ll see that the lengthy, well-reasoned arguments came from opponents. Supporters said little more than, “Yeah, free books.” With that sort of background, winning in court and on appeal became much less likely, particularly with opposition from the Department of Justice.
This is Google’s Plan B. It’ll generate perhaps 90% of the income that the original settlement would have generated. Their book database will have out-of-print books copyrighted in the U.S. and published in the larger English-speaking countries. Keep in mind that, since this database will only be directly accessible to people in the U.S., the fact that only a relatively few German, French, and Spanish language books will be available won’t reduce their income much. Google’s goal have never been to help scholars. The sheer sloppiness of what it is doing proves that. They intended to do with books what has made them rich with webpages–selling ads to be placed alongside content that others generate. Imagine a Hollywood that sells tickets to movies others have made without paying their creators a penny and you’ll realize how Google has grown so rich. Like any such corporation, they want to grow even richer by expanding their reach.
Also, one of Google’s other concessions, allowing other online providers to display these same books on a theoretically equal basis isn’t likely to hurt Google that much. They intend to dominate this market like they dominate the search engine market. Others may have those same books, but people will probably flock to Google.
There’s another factor that’s yet to get much press attention. Google was by far and above the largest Silicon Valley contributor to Obama’s campaign and it did so while the ‘smart money’ was still going to Hillary. Obama has an enormous political debt to Google to repay and there’s nothing that’ll come along in the next few years that’s likely to matter to Google more than getting this settlement through.
It is this last factor that may prove in the end the most important. The Obama administration formally announced that the judge in the case was being promoted to the appeals court the very day before a hearing in which that judge called for the revised settlement to be rushed through quickly and without much attention being paid to the objections made to the previous settlement. That ‘rush through without enough time for objections’ approach is now the most important issue surrounding this dispute among the lawyers involved.
Circumstance like that involving the judge prove nothing, but they do create an atmosphere of suspicion around this second settlement and will, quite likely, mean that it will be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.