I once listened to Siva Vaidhyanathan, a well-respected but controversial media professor, expound on the perils of overly 'thick' copyright protection to a room of anxiety-ridden, cash-strapped publishers, the rough equivalent of trying to pitch increased public transport funding to a struggling car salesman. As Vaidhyanathan pressed his audience about the necessity of something he calls 'thin copyright protection: just strong enough to encourage and reward aspiring artists [...] yet porous enough to allow full and rich democratic speech and the free flow of information' i and the internet as the ideal staging ground for a revolution in how we view intellectual property, we all quietly wondered who, exactly, had invited him.
This was in 2004, shortly after Google had made the announcement that sent tremors through the publishing world-it intended to digitize around 15 million printed volumes over the course of six years, including Stanford University and University of Michigan's entire collections and the partial collections of several other prestigious institutions. Google would make 'snippets' of these works as well as scanned out-of-copyright books available to users through its search engine, while in-copyright (but out-of-print) books would be sold directly through Google. Google's aim, it claimed, was to create a kind of universal library, facilitating research and opening up access to volumes that might otherwise molder away on the back shelves, or alternately, as Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the President of France's Bibliothèque nationale, later wrote, to 'benefit humanity while making a lot of money.' ii Red flags were immediately raised over the preservation of intellectual property while in the background harbingers of doom foretold a quiet death for the paper-printed word.
However on October 28th, after a few years of back and forth and a slew of hefty lawsuits, a compromise was announced between Google, the US Authors' Guild and the Association of American Publishers: Google would pay out $125m (£77.5m) for the rights to reproduce these books and split all sales for in-copyright material 37/63 with publishers, 'conced[ing] the core principle of copyright' iii while on the surface striking the exact balance that Vaidhyanathan had been advocating for-it all looked rosy, so why then has Vaidhyanathan since come out against Google Book Search?
Like the UK Booksellers Association and Federation of European Publishers who both issued recent warnings about Google's de facto monopoly on the e-book trade, Vaidhyanathan warns of a hegemonic Google, a titanic American commercial body taking on the mantle of 'decider.' While the publishers' and booksellers' concern has been voiced primarily about Google's pricing decisions, scholars, archivists and librarians are troubled about the formation of a Google (read American English) Cannon. Jeanneney deflates Google's 'universal library' rhetoric by stating unequivocally that 'there can be no universal library, only specific ways of looking at what is universal (choices are always made and must be made).' iv Translations, which make up less than 3% of books published in the US, will be neglected, Jeanneney worries, and American English will further solidify its position as the lingua franca of the book trade. Vaidhyanathan also cautions against 'giving away access to one company that is cornering the market on online access,' v depleting the web's book trade of vital plurality by channeling resources into one pool of information.
This resistance has found root in the States in the formation of the Open Content Alliance (which I like to imagine as a rag-tag band of librarians plotting incursions against Google by candlelight, but in reality consists of The Smithsonian, the Boston Public Library and a growing number of others) who have turned away from Google's offer to foot the digitization fee in return for exclusive use of the scanned files. Instead, the OCA has pooled its resources to create its own files for wide dissemination, not just to Google but to all search engines--'One is shaped by commercial concerns,' Paul Duguid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley told the New York Times, 'the other by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear.' vi
What is clear is that Vaidhyanathan's 2001 pre-Facebook/Obama/Moveon.org imagining of 'the digital moment' as 'the rise of networks […] to share ideas, information, expressions, truths, and lies over vast distances [...] has deeply frightened the powerful and empowered those blessed with a connection to the network' was prescient. What happens to the network when powerful interests come into play is left to be seen.
i
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York University Press: New York, 2001.
ii
Jeanneney, Jean-Noël. Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2007.
Denny, Neil. 'A declaration of co-dependence.' The Bookseller.com. 3rd November 2008. The Bookseller. 13th November 2008 http://www.thebookseller.co.uk/blogs/70115-a-declaration-of-co-dependence--.html.
iii
Jeanneney, Jean-Noël. Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2007.
iv
'Google deal not good for open access.' The Bookseller.com. 6th November 2008. The Bookseller. 13th November 2008 < http://www.thebookseller.co.uk/news/70452-google-deal-not-good-for-open-access.html>.
v
Hafner, Katie. 'Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web.' New York Times.com. 22nd October 2007. New York Times. 13th November 2008 .
vi
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York University Press: New York, 2001.
