Markets

Sergey Brin Defends Google's "Library to Last Forever"

By David Weir

Updated on: October 9, 2009 / 3:12 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

A recent headline in The New York Times captured the dynamic of the Google Book Search controversy perfectly: "In E-Books, It's an Army vs. Google."

The opposition that has coalesced against Google's ambitious plan to digitize virtually every book ever published includes European governments, U.S. state governments, the U.S. Justice Department, Microsoft and Yahoo, as well as a broad, influential coalition of academics, librarians, authors, publishers and activists.

While impressive, what the opponents lack is a real alternative to how all the knowledge locked up in pre-Internet print volumes is going to made accessible online in the 21st Century should Google's effort fail.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin spoke out this week in an op-ed in The Times that vigorously defends his company's plan.

Here are some of the salient points from his article:

"(T)he vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries."
"Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters."
"Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it."
To date, Google has scanned ten million books.
Regarding the proposed settlement of a lawsuit brought by the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers: "While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books."
"Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether."
"Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort."
"Last, there have been objections to specific aspects of the Google Books product and the future service as planned under the settlement, including questions about the quality of bibliographic information, our choice of classification system and the details of our privacy policy. These are all valid questions, and being a company that obsesses over the quality of our products, we are working hard to address them -- improving bibliographic information and categorization, and further detailing our privacy policy."

Meanwhile, the Federal Judge overseeing ongoing negotiations among the parties to the lawsuit, Denny Chin, has set November 9th as the new deadline for a new proposed settlement to be submitted to the court.

Related recent Bnet links:
The Google Book Case Settlement is Dead "The proposed settlement of the class-action lawsuit against Google Book Search is officially dead tonight. Just days after..."
DoJ Intervenes Against Google Book Search "The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) tonight has informed the federal judge overseeing a proposed class-action settlement of the Google Book Search case that it officially opposes the settlement..."
The Bottom Line of Google Book Search "Yesterday was the filing deadline set by Denny Chin, the federal judge overseeing the Google Book Search case, so over the last few weeks the court has received letters, briefs, and other documents from hundreds of parties from around the world..."