CULTURE SHOCK:Nobody should have the kind of power over the written word that Google has acquired thanks to one small court case in the US, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
FOR THE LAST four years, Google has been systematically digitising millions of books. Most of those books are subject to copyright – they are the intellectual property of their authors, who were not consulted by Google about the digitisation process. Of the seven million books digitised so far, just one million are in the public domain. One million are both in print and in copyright. The rest are out of print but still in copyright.
This situation thus presents by far the biggest challenge ever mounted to the concept of an author’s rights to control his or her own work. Copyright is a relatively recent invention (it began in England in 1710) and it is reasonable to ask whether it matters all that much. Euripides didn’t need it, after all, and neither did Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes or Swift. In other ages and other societies, authors have found a way of making a living and reaching an audience without having a small circled c beside their names.
The problem is that none of them functioned outside the worlds of elite patronage, or in the Greek case civic patronage, and none of them functioned in the age of mass reproduction. Copyright has been crucial to the idea of individual and relatively free creative expression. As the literary executors of a number of 20th-century authors (including WH Auden, Joseph Brodsky and Mary McCarthy) wrote in the New York Review of Books recently: “Until authors secured their own copyright, their fate was in the hands of benevolent or not so benevolent institutions – the church, the aristocracy, the university, the ruling party, the printing house. Autonomous copyright allows authors to benefit directly from their creative labour; it also removes powerful instruments of censorship, and it makes readers, as opposed to political agencies, the nourishers of the work they value.” It was thus unlikely that Google’s vast digitisation project would go unchallenged. In 2005, the US Authors Guild took a case alleging breach of copyright and was joined shortly afterwards by a group of major publishers.
After lengthy negotiations, a settlement was reached and lodged with the New York courts, which have yet to approve it. If they do, however, it will have startling implications, not just for writers and publishers, but for written culture in general. Although the settlement is framed within US law, Google’s global reach means that it will essentially shape the context in which books are written, accessed and read for the foreseeable future.
The good thing about the settlement is that it retains – one might even say restores – the idea of copyright. A Books Rights Registry will act for the copyright holders, licensing to Google the right to construct a vast digital database of potentially every book in copyright in the US. (Authors will be assumed to be part of the deal unless they specifically opt out.) Google will in turn give very limited free access to this database to every public library (just one terminal per library). It will sell access to institutions and individuals. One-third of the profits will go to Google and two-thirds to the publishers.
This sounds great and, in some ways, it is. The Google book bank will be far bigger than even the greatest physical libraries, and can be accessed, in principle, from anywhere. Digital books, with their easy searchability, are a fantastic resource for research. In a real way, the democratisation of knowledge, at least in the developed world, is happening before our eyes.
What’s not to like? The problem, as the cultural historian Robert Darnton argued in the New York Review, is that Google will be the gatekeeper. In his view the project means not a brave new world of public access to the written word, but the transformation of the internet into “an instrument for privatising knowledge that belongs in the public sphere”. The great public libraries whose stocks are the core of the digitisation project will effectively be handing over control of online dissemination to a private, for-profit institution.
Google, Darton argues, will acquire an effective monopoly of digital-book distribution. The vast Books Rights Registry will not want to encourage competitors to undercut whatever Google is charging for access, since such a move would hit its own two-thirds stake in the profits. And since every author is assumed by default to be part of the registry, the task of a competitor in getting individual authors to sign up for its service would be hopeless. Google has already all but elbowed out other forces in the book-digitalisation field, and not just small ones such as the Open Content Alliance, but huge players such as Microsoft, which abandoned its attempt at a competing project last May.
In essence, as a result of one private court case in the US, the immense power of the digital book will be Google’s to command. No king, no court, no academy, no censor, no dictator has ever enjoyed the level of control over the written word that a private company will have acquired. And the corporation will have spent, according to the estimate given by Randall Stross in his recent book Planet Google, around $900 million (€666 million) on the actual process of digitisation. However benign one assumes Google to be, it would be naive to suppose that any corporation spends that kind of money on a purely altruistic project. It will want a return on its investment.
If you put that demand for profit next to an effective monopoly position, what you get, historically, is the abuse of power. Google might be marvellous in many ways, but it has already shown a tendency to swagger, telling publishers, for example, that it would assume the right to digitalise all books unless specifically instructed otherwise. The very scale of its ambition – according to Stross, it plans to “bring the entire world of published text into its digital storehouse” – smacks of megalomania. And Google has shown itself willing, in China for example, to bow to the demands of authoritarian governments to limit information when its own commercial interests are at stake.
Nobody, nasty or nice, should have the kind of power over the written word that Google is acquiring. But who can stop the juggernaut? It may take up to two years for the US courts to ratify the legal settlement. That may be all the time that is left for European publishers, libraries and governments to decide whether they will look for an alternative system or accept that, after all, Google is the mind of God.
fotoole@irishtimes.com