Publishers’ fear of findability
Two days ago, Times Online published an incredibly poorly researched opinion piece by William Rees-Mogg – a few quotes:
[...] Copyright is the mother of invention. No copyright — no revenue — no innovation.
Yet there is a conflict of interest between search engines and the right to intellectual property. Google plans to put whole libraries on to its system, and offer free copying rights to its users. Searches would throw up key passages in all the books in a library. [...] The danger — put simply — is that people will not buy books; they will wait to download them free from Google.
“No copyright — no revenue — no innovation.” Eh, the picture is a bit more complicated than that, but well…
“[...] offer free copying rights to its users.” Hmm, I missed that one, I believe. Google doesn’t offer any “copying rights” at all. For books of which the publishers are not part of Google’s Book Search Partner Program, it only displays snippets of those books, allowing people to actually find them.
“[...] people will not buy books; they will wait to download them free from Google.” That’s just plain wrong. Nobody is “waiting” to “download” anything at all. They might be waiting until the book appears in Google Books so that they can easily find it, though.
Similarly ridiculous statements—targeting Google News this time—are coming from the World Association of Newspapers. From an interview with its president Gavin O’Reilly in yesterday’s Financial Times:
Services such as Google News link to original news stories on the home pages of newspapers and magazines and display only the headline and one paragraph of the story. “That’s often enough” for readers browsing the top stories, Mr O’Reilly said.
[...]
[O'Reilly:] “The irony is that these search engines exist, largely, because of the traditional news and content aggregators and profit at their expense.”
[...]
Mr O’Reilly likened the initiative to the conflict between the music industry and illegal file-sharing websites and said it was not a sign that publishers had failed to create a competitive online business model of their own.
“I think newspapers have developed very compelling web portals and news channels but the fact here is that we’re dealing with basic theft,” he said.
We’re talking about linked headlines (and sometimes a short snippet), right? How can this be compared to “illegal file-sharing websites”? Or “theft”? Also, the statement that search engines “exist [...] because of the traditional news and content aggregators” is a flawed argument. Any search index exists at the grace of the content it makes searchable. If there is no content, there is no need for an index. If there is content, you’ll need some sort of index. It’s that simple. So what is wrong with Google making that index? Maybe the fact that it shows competing media outlets on the same page, possibly inviting people to go elsewhere?
Mr. Rees-Mogg might be wrong. Condition for that is that there is no program available that automatically downloads consecutive snippets and puzzles them together to extract the whole book from a multitude of Google searches.
As of today, I am not aware of such software existing, but it should be not too difficult to build. Since all that stands between that happening and the protection of copyrights is Google’s DRM effort, and DRM efforts can as you know never be effective, we might find some such program available in the near future. It might be interesting to discuss if such a program would be illegal under anti-circumvention laws.
But anyway, you and other Google supporters are wrong when you say that Google is serving “only snippets”. That is only correct for the individual search. To the totality of searches, Google is serving all the parts of the puzzle, and it only takes an effort to collect them and assemble them to, indeed, download whole books.
» Karl-Friedrich Lenz on February 2nd, 2006 at 13:22
“[...] Google’s DRM effort, and DRM efforts can as you know never be effective [...]”
If you look at Google’s service on the “individual search” level, it’s only a matter of access control: no security through obscurity, users just have limited access to Google’s database.
If you look at the service from a “totality of searches” point of view, it indeed resembles a DRM system (but only vaguely): there are restrictions on usage (that is, you can only view small snippets per time unit), but the full text can be extracted in an ‘analog hole’ like way (i.e. do an automated search for subsequent snippets, OCR, paste together). However, is this a real DRM system? Is cutting a file in smaller parts the same as scrambling that file, so that it can only be opened with the appropriate application?
In other words, I don’t believe that the puzzling program you describe would be illegal (under anti-circumvention provisions), as there wouldn’t be any circumvention activity going on – it’s just puzzling.
Note: in case such a puzzling program is made, it is very probable that Google will block it from abusing its index. Furthermore, I expect that the Google Book Search API (if we ever see one) will have security hooks that prevents users from extracting full book contents.
» Andreas Bovens on February 5th, 2006 at 04:08