Google Book Search settlement gives Google a virtual monopoly over literature - Boing Boing »

Posted By tdrapeau 7 months, 3 weeks ago in News

Prop it 11 Drop it

The Authors Guild -- which represents a measly 8000 writers -- brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of "orphan works" whose rightsholders can't be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won't ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results.

The Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers (who took part in the settlement) totally missed the real risk of Google Book Search: they were worried about some notional income from advertising that they might miss out on. But the real risk is that Google could end up as the sole source of ultimate power in book discovery, distribution and sales. As the only legal place where all books can be searched, Google gets enormous market power: the structure of their search algorithm can make bestsellers or banish books to obscurity. The leverage they attain over publishing and authors through this settlement is incalculable.