Upcoming issue of The New York Review of Books carries a thoughtful, and very disquieting, jeremiad against-slash-utopian advocacy for Google's ongoing digitization of (for the moment mainly American) books in public libraries. This hardly the forum for discussing finer points of the diatribe, nor of Google's larger rôle in all this, but, knowing the seriously-loopsided state of literary copyrights (e.g. where legal protection of the Micky Mouse figure, a Walt Disney property, now-extended to 75 years after its creator's death [1956?] has been allowed to govern extension of all such rights), it should be required reading to all for whom books, in both their physical and virtual sense, aren't merely future digitization-fodder. Commercial monopolies --either such by-design, or factual-- are never consistent with larger public good, yet that sounds exactly like the outcome of that US copyright holders' legal settlement with sole-thus-precedent-owning Our Google, That Art in the Cloud.

"[...] While the public authorities slept, Google took the initiative. It did not seek to settle its affairs in court. It went about its business, scanning books in libraries; and it scanned them so effectively as to arouse the appetite of others for a share in the potential profits. No one should dispute the claim of authors and publishers to income from rights that properly belong to them; nor should anyone presume to pass quick judgment on the contending parties of the lawsuit. The district court judge will pronounce on the validity of the settlement, but that is primarily a matter of dividing profits, not of promoting the public interest. [...]"

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281

February 12, 2009

Google & the Future of Books

By Robert Darnton