Google Book Search wants to eat your brains – Telegraph Blogs

Friday 9 October 2015 | Blog Feed | All feeds

Advertisement

Basheera Khan

Basheera Khan writes about social media, cool new software and all things geek. In addition to blogging for the Telegraph, she is an occasional contributor to TechCrunch Europe and a freelance user experience consultant. Bash is a South African living in London. Yes, another one. More about Basheera.

Google Book Search wants to eat your brains

books_logoTsk, tsk. Google's letting its 'Benevolent Benefactor of the Interwebs' mask slip again, revealing the cold and calculated commercial interests that drive its attempts to shape the net in its favour. This time it's through Google Book Search, the project that started out five years ago as Google Print.

If you're not aware, Google Book Search represents the company's effort to create the largest digital archive of out-of-print books. No doubt it saw a niche: the original largest digital archive of out-of-print books, the volunteer-driven Project Gutenberg, is avowedly non-commercial and plans to stay that way.

So Google set to, scanning millions of titles and roping in a number of respected, high profile libraries around the world to help continue its self-appointed mission to grant itself the monopoly on other people's intellectual property.

Of course, it happened to scan works that were still in copyright, and oops! – it did this without asking permission, prompting the US Authors Guild to bring a class action lawsuit over the teensy issue of copyright infringement.

Like a recalcitrant child made to grudgingly deliver an insincere apology after a schoolyard bust-up, Google temporarily stopped scanning copyrighted works while it kludged together a way for copyright owners to opt out of the grand plan.

In other words, it found a solution that cost it next to nothing to implement while shifting the burden of responsibility to authors who haven't an iota of comparable resources. Nice one, Google. I see what you did there.

Google settled out of court, but objections to the case keep rolling in. The fairness of the deal that Google cut with authors and publishers will be determined in October, and because the outcome will have far-reaching effect, the literary world is watching closely.

It's not just about money; it's also about authors retaining their moral rights, as American author Robert G. Picard spells out:

The Google settlement will essentially rewrite copyright law by allowing the company to use the material without permission, without negotiating how the material will be used, and without negotiating compensation and payment provisions. It is particularly offensive because the court will be saying the government doesn’t have to protect authors’ rights, but authors’ have to protect their own rights. This is a significantly different approach from that which prosecutors and courts have taken in the cases of music, game, and software file sharers who have violated copyright on the Internet.

And it's not just the publishing industry that stands to lose if Google gets its way. Consumers have privacy concerns to chew over.

© hughelectronic

© hughelectronic

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, Google has pointedly avoided saying one way or another whether it will protect readers' rights to privacy and anonymity.

One ray of hope comes from the Open Content Alliance, a collective of powerful multinational organisations spanning culture, technology, the nonprofit sector and government, formed in response to Google Book Search. The British Library is among this company, and Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will soon be throwing their weight in as well.

The OCA too would like to contribute to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts – only it happens to be doing it right. It takes the opposite approach to Google's arse about face dealings with copyright owners.

Peter Brantley, executive director of the non-profit Digital Library Federation, explains the OCA's position and the problem with Google Blog Search in a nutshell:

For the browsing, lending, and vending of digital books, the [Internet] Archive is seeking an open and competitive market with appropriate safeguards for readers, not a monopoly bookstore created by the biggest online advertising company in the world.

What really gets my goat in this entire episode of web history in the making is that Google is presenting its Book Search as a fait accompli: glossing over the tedious matter of the settlement awaiting court approval with a cheeriness that borders on sinister.

Which brings me to my final note. If this were a popularity contest based on looks alone, Google Book Search would walk it. Make no mistake, the OCA's corner is worthier. But winning consumers over often comes down to sexiness, and from a purely technological view, Google Book Search has got sexy down pat.

comments powered by Disqus
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/basheerakhan/100003113/google-book-search-wants-to-eat-your-brains/
blogs.telegraph.co.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-40
59698
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:DEEQL3X62R5CLB63WSXPQYWPE4V6B4TU
<urn:uuid:377f777a-5db7-4e6b-94c9-32585147daca>
2015-10-09T14:17:16Z
23.3.13.224
sha1:7Y7MZHRQSAU5BT2HVWXPXZ7IF6543GZE
<urn:uuid:fd1fd02a-2eaa-47dd-b7e7-c9b8cd01e6d2>
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/basheerakhan/100003113/google-book-search-wants-to-eat-your-brains/
response
<urn:uuid:b19b3294-71a7-4346-8906-d4a5a773231c>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-137-6-227.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-40
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf