Searching to Preserve Dominance

A smartly titled post by Devereax Chatillion on the Huffington Post explores Google’s motives for developing exclusive rights to the digital library. Chatillion, an intellectual property partner in the New York office of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, calls out the search giant for attempting to lock in their search dominance via book scanning:

If the settlement is approved by the Court, Google will be the only search engine that will serve up search results that include the contents of some 5-10 million books — the books whose authors, publishers, copyright holders can’t be found or don’t want to be found. Because of the intersection of copyright and class action law woven together by the proposed settlement, no one else will be able to do that …. It means that Google’s ability to refine its algorithms for search results and its analysis of consumer behavior, interests, and needs will have a depth and a range that no one else can match.

The author is exactly right! The same point was made by the Department of Justice when the spoke of concerns over Google’s “exclusive access” to the book library and laid out in detail by the OBA’s own Gary Reback in his January filing with Judge Chin where he wrote:

Google will get an enormous advantage over its search competitors if it can support (i.e., respond satisfactorily to) tail queries that its competitors cannot.

Google itself has stated multiple times that they’re excited about the value their exclusive digital library will add to their search algorithm.

Later in the Huffington Post piece Chatillion goes further, noting that the benefits go beyond just the exclusive access to scanned books:

Google’s exclusive ability to map these books, and to observe how consumers interact with that map and the content that these books represent, would give Google a significant competitive advantage in the most profitable internet related market in which it is already dominant.

We couldn’t agree more with that or Chantillion’s closing comments that a truly private – and exclusive – digital library is not the way to deliver benefits to the public.

Google’s Shutterbug Stumble

By Peter Brantley

Given that Google is trying to secure an exclusive license to millions of books through a complex legal process in order to further feed their advertising profits, it’s not surprising that their legal troubles continue to mount.  This time it’s a lawsuit from the creative community of photographers and visual artists including:  the American Society of Media Photographers, Graphic Artists Guild, the North American Nature Photography Association, the Professional Photographers of America, and individual photographers and illustrators.

Of particular interest is whether Google’s commercialization of the digital copies of books they have scanned without rightsholder permission extends to the photos, illustrations, maps, and other visual images that appear in those books.  As I tweeted last night:

Wonder if Google utilizes digitized photos from #GBS even if it redacts them, to enhance image search algorithms. captions+images.

And…

An archive of historical images, plus associated captions scanned and ocr’d from books, is a nice data set in its own right #GBS

In response to the Amended Settlement Agreement, new attention was brought by the Open Book Alliance and the Department of Justice to the advantage a corpus of millions of books would give Google in the Internet search market.  This unfair competitive advantage would be compounded by including the images at the heart of this new lawsuit.

In the past two weeks, Google also attracted a new lawsuit from major French publishers, having already been found guilty of copyright infringement in France.  In January, authors groups filed a lawsuit in India alleging copyright violation.

This is in addition to the unprecedented show of opposition to their effort to settle their lawsuit over copyright infringement in the U.S.  That opposition included the United States government, many foreign governments, several U.S. States, authors groups, labor unions, libraries, consumer advocates, and technology companies.

It’s not difficult to envision even more legal action in the coming months.  Scott Moss, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School was quoted in the New York Times on this point:

Google is trying to control or expand access to virtually all information in the world.  It isn’t surprising that their settlement with written authors doesn’t end all their legal battles.

With the ever growing legal entanglements surrounding Google’s book business deal, it’s clearer than ever that Congressional action is necessary to prevent a corporate monopoly of our nation’s cultural and literary history.