THE DIGITAL revolution has taken many forms, affecting both how we work and how we use our leisure time. Downloading music from the Internet and accessing it either on computers or on mobile phones has become a huge industry. However, digital books have been slower to secure public acceptance and in 2004 Google, the world’s biggest Internet company, sought to change that. It announced plans to scan all the world’s printed books and to place their contents online for public access. The result would be a giant virtual bookshelf in cyber space where readers could read the digital editions of millions of books. Publications, including rare works which for years were inaccessible to many, would be made more widely available to all.
Five years later, Google’s ambitious goal has been partly realised but not without public controversy and increased opposition, particularly in Europe. The European Commission will hold a hearing next month to discuss Google’s proposed settlement with US publishers and authors on copyright payments for the digital use and sale of their works. Under the terms of the settlement, which is also under court review in the US, many European publishers fear they could lose out as the rights of foreign authors and publishers would be less well protected. Google has rejected their concerns and says the project is part of its mission to “organise the world’s information”.
Google proposes to pay $125 million (€88.6 million) to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers can register works and be paid from book sales and subscriptions. However, unless copyright owners opt out of this plan, it seems that under US law Google and the new books registry would be allowed to sell their work. European publishers have responded angrily. Britain and France have supported Germany in its complaint that Google had scanned books from US libraries without the prior consent of rights holders.
Certainly the matter has received less debate than it deserves, not least in Ireland where publishers and authors are also affected by Google’s library project. As a publicly quoted company, Google’s primary function is to serve the interests of its shareholders. Quite clearly, the commercial return from assembling the world’s most comprehensive book collection could be considerable. The terms of its US legal settlement raise some worrying and obvious questions: whether Google has too much power in the book world and whether it is attempting to monopolise access to knowledge?