The Google Guys (18 page)

Smith and his team found a receptive audience. They met with major publishers and offered the same deal they had given the libraries: the publishers would supply the books, and Google would digitize them, put them online, make short excerpts available to the public, and provide links to sites where people could buy the books, if interested. Google would cover all expenses and wouldn't even collect any fees for referring buyers, although publishers could also run ads along with the displayed text, paying for clicks in a bidding auction like any other advertiser. In the case of books under copyright, people would be able to search through them to find a piece of information, but Google would provide only short snippets of text at a time. For publishers that wanted it, access would be further limited by restricting the amount of text available to just 20 percent of the book per month.

Google argued that the main benefit to publishers would be to raise the profile of books for sale. Most people don't want to read an entire book online, and would rather buy an easier-toread paper version if they found the book interesting enough. Google's approach, says Smith, is to offer an experience that “is akin to walking into a bookstore and flipping through books.”

In each publishing house, they found someone to champion Google's idea. Many of them said yes, some of them on a provisional basis, to see how well the program worked. Some balked at the concept that offering free access to books would cause people to buy them.

Google also makes the program available to anyone with a book for sale. Book authors can put searchable copies of their work on their blogs with a link to Amazon, collecting Amazon's 10 to 15 percent kickback every time someone clicks on the Amazon link and buys the books.

The program has been a success. Today it has digitized and posted about seven million books. Smith says that Google has found that the more book pages people view, the more likely they are to end up buying the whole book.

But controversy over the program lingered. Books still in print were no problem. Books out of print were, because many of them are still under copyright, and the copyright owners are often difficult to find, especially when it comes to older published works.

Over the years, copyright law in the United States has become increasingly liberal toward the copyright owners. Modern copyright laws started a couple hundred years after Gutenberg invented the printing press in the fifteenth century. In 1662, Charles II, the king of Great Britain and Ireland, established the Licensing Act, creating a register of licensed books. This didn't protect the creators of the work, but provided a monopoly to the Stationer's Company to sell the works. In 1709, under the reign of Queen Anne, Britain established the first true copyright, known as the Statute of Anne. That act granted exclusive rights for twenty-one years, but this time to the authors instead of the publishers. Since then, copyright laws have been an issue of great controversy, revision, and debate.

In the United States, the founding fathers granted Congress the right to set copyright laws in the Constitution. Congress did so in 1790, stipulating that copyright holders should hold the rights to their works for fourteen years and had the right to renew once for a second fourteen-year term. After that, the works were in the public domain. Since then, the length of copyright has been repeatedly expanded. In 1831 it was extended to twenty-eight years with a fourteen-year renewal. In 1909 the renewal term was also expanded, to twenty-eight years. In 1976 it was expanded to the life of the creator of the work plus fifty years. In 1998 it grew to seventy years after the death of the work's creator. This was later extended to ninety-five years. By this time, it became difficult to find just who owned the copyright, especially for obscure and out-of-print works. And copyrights have been applied to more and more types of works, including photographs, film, music, dramatic compositions, and eventually all published works, including computer programs, semiconductor chips, and online works. Nobody has to apply for copyright anymore—their works' mere publication gives them all rights automatically.

Stanford professor and legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, who has advised Larry and Sergey on the matter, argues that this is unreasonable and that copyright laws have reached onerous levels that do more harm than good. He points out that in 1930, 10,027 books were published, and that 9,853 are now out of print, putting them out of reach of the public. But it's almost impossible to determine which heirs, descendants, or corporations own the copyright to the vast majority of those books, which prevents them from being republished. Google, Lessig says, is trying to bring these books back to life. “Publishers don't have a moral position to stand on,” he says. He describes Google Print this way: “The project promises to radically enhance our access to the past—to remind us of forgotten information. It is the greatest gift to knowledge since, well, Google.”

The big problem with current copyright law, Lessig argues, is that people can no longer create derivative works, a long-standing approach to creating new work. Shakespeare's works are repeatedly used as inspiration, such as for the Broadway musical
West Side Story,
a retelling of
Romeo and Juliet
. Disney has been a powerful force in lobbying for extended copyright, preventing anyone from reproducing Mickey Mouse or creating a derivative character. Ironically, Mickey Mouse was itself a derivative work. The first Mickey cartoon,
Steamboat Willie
, from 1928, was itself a parody of a Buster Keaton movie,
Steamboat Bill, Jr.
, which was created the same year—despite the fact that U.S. copyrights were extended to films in 1912.

Book publishers have a problem with Google's ambitions to index all the world's books. Google promised that it would respect any copyright, as long as it could figure out who held it. There is no comprehensive registry of copyright, but the copyright owner could come forward and claim the work, subjecting it to the same terms as works still in print. This wasn't good enough for publishers. On October 19, 2005, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, the latter representing five major publishers—including Penguin Group (USA) Inc., the parent company of the publisher of this book—filed a lawsuit against Google, arguing that the plan to digitize, search, and show snippets of copyrighted books was illegal. The argument was that Google should find the copyright holders themselves, a task that Google said would be prohibitively expensive.

Google's view has been that the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act of 1997, which became Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996, protects its efforts, since the act states that online publishers are obligated to remove copyrighted material only after copyright owners ask them to do so. But many experts disagree with this view, insisting that it applies only to sites where users post copyrighted works on a site owned by someone else, such as YouTube.

At Google's annual shareholders meeting in 2004, Google lawyer David Drummond said, “We do run into a lot of areas where our innovation bumps up against laws that were not designed for the world we now live in. Sometimes others don't share our commitment [to change]. Trademark and copyright laws are two areas where we have legitimate disagreements [with existing companies and lawmakers].”

In October 2005, Eric Schmidt wrote an op-ed piece in the
Wall Street Journal
titled “Books of Revelation.” In it, he argued that for most books, the amount of information available through Google Book Search would be comparable to a library card catalog. The lawsuit by the publishers would keep 60 percent of existing books out of Google's library. “We find it difficult to believe that authors will stop writing books because Google Print makes them easier to find, or that publishers will stop selling books because Google Print might increase their sales,” wrote Schmidt.
¹
He argued that book sales would increase and that people in developing countries would have access to information they could not possibly get any other way.

Larry and Sergey see their task as nothing less than creating a new Hellenistic Age. “We did not think necessarily we could make money” off Book Search, says Sergey. “We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site.”
²

But Larry and Sergey are getting older, and they have developed more willingness to compromise—some say they are compromising their idealism. On October 28, 2008, they reached a settlement with the publishers over Google Book Search. In exchange for the right to provide free full-text versions of out-of-print books, it agreed to make payments totaling $125 million. The money, which comes from revenue Google generates from publishing the works, goes to authors and publishers. It has also agreed to create a not-for-profit Books Rights Registry to try to locate the copyright holders, to collect and maintain details of their rights, and provide a way for the copyright holders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project. “The boys have grown up,” says Schmidt. “The young men I started with seven years ago are now seasoned executives. They're no longer the stereotype [of computer geeks]. It's offensive to them to treat them any other way.”

David Drummond was the one who worked out the settlement. But Larry, Sergey, and Schmidt all signed on immediately. “When David came in and briefed us, it was a no-brainer,” says Schmidt. “There was never any significant dissent. It was a clever and innovative approach to the problem. We have to pick our battles.” And, one might note, $125 million is no longer a prohibitive amount of money to Google in exchange for ending a costly and time-consuming lawsuit (despite its pared-down daycare system).

Sergey enthusiastically praised the settlement when it was announced. “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor. While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips.”

Some people, however, do want Larry and Sergey to remain the idealistic geeks defending their causes. Criticism of the settlement came from online. Some bloggers complained that by selling out instead of pursuing the case in court, Google gave up the opportunity to establish the legality of providing short passages from published works, which should fall under the “fair use” provisions of copyright laws. And, in fact, Larry and Sergey still believe that they are covered by fair use laws, even without the settlement. “The agreement we came to was not about lack of confidence in the legal case,” says Smith, “but about what we and publishers could do together.” The prevailing view at Google is that the settlement serves the interests of all parties involved. In response to the criticism over the settlement, Smith says, “Google isn't in the business of establishing legal precedents.”

Further into the future, the problem becomes even more complex. As technology improves, it will become easier to read entire digitized books online or through specially designed digital book readers. As books are digitized, it will be easy for pirates to copy and share them. People are used to lending books to friends, and electronic publishing will make it possible to share books with a few million of them. And given the nature of the Internet, people are likely to create book “mashups,” combining excerpts from many different books, videos, and music into new works. Who collects revenue from such projects?

Google does not create the problem, it simply adds fuel to the fire of a trend that has already been made inevitable by the Internet. When there are pirated books and mashups floating about the Internet, Google's search engine will find them.

Existing industries still have to figure out how to deal with the Internet and its changes. The Internet, with Google pushing it along, is simply and significantly a new alternative to existing forms of media and entertainment. Bloggers, for example, have become a huge form of publishing. Social networks pull young people away from older forms of entertainment and socializing. Google has figured out how to make money off all these new forms of entertainment, while every competitor is struggling with that issue.

Online news is rapidly replacing the local newspaper. Google and companies such as Craigslist are providing a better and more cost-effective form of classified advertising, eating up a huge portion of newspapers' revenue. Many news publishers don't like this fact. Belgian news companies have successfully sued Google just for offering snippets of their articles before sending readers off to the source for the full story.

All publishers will have to come to terms with the Internet and will need to be deeply involved in the coming changes, including figuring out how to make a buck in an age of rampant piracy—or they could be sideswiped by these rapidly moving vehicles of change.

Most likely, Google will play a huge role in the transformation of these industries, and publishers and creators will have to follow its lead. Their best bet is to start thinking more like Larry and Sergey. They need to create economic models that accept a certain level of piracy. The best way to do that is to figure out how to serve the needs of their customers, rather than suing them to keep them from sharing works through the Internet. Google has already begun experimenting with, and tracking, the value of free distribution as a marketing tool.

But the solutions to these problems will not come easily, and many of the answers will be determined in court, often with Google as a defendant. It is likely that the supreme courts of many countries will end up defining the rights of publishers and, perhaps, redefining the scope of copyright law. The difference is that Larry and Sergey may not fight as hard to defend their views. They're becoming less ruthless than the Ptolemy clan.