Unprecedented move by Google hopefully enriches

Google, the ubiquitous presence that every scholar, college student, and layman has grown to depend on and utilize will soon be the largest rights holder of copyrights our civilized existence has ever known.

Google Books began scanning and then digitizing books in the University of Michigan's library in 2004 which set off an alarm for the Authors Guild (AG), Association of American Publishers (AAP), and a small band of authors and publishers. They filed a class-action lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement in September of 2005.

The AG and AAP, acting on behalf of every author and publisher ever, reached a settlement agreement in October of 2008 that "will establish a new not-for-profit organization controlled by authors and publishers, the Books Rights Registry, which will collect and distribute revenue from Google and maintain a database on rights holders," according to a statement released by the AG in December of 2008.

Google will provide a digitized database to libraries and universities and "All licensing revenues go initially to Google, which keeps its 37% share and forwards the remaining 63% to the Books Rights Registry. The Registry then forwards the appropriate amount to rights holders, keeping an administrative fee," according to the aforementioned statement. In the uber corporate legalese jargon of the Google Book Settlement, there are many different categories and sub-categories that determine who receives what revenues.

The Books Rights Registry is an arm of Google meant to act as the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) does for the recording industry, and while we all would like to trust Google's unerring moral fortitude, how is a subsidiary going to objectively set prices, dole out revenue, and maintain good business practices?

What Google essentially has accomplished is a monopoly of information that will affect everyone that reads, publishes, or collects information. This includes public libraries those beacons of public interest that are so necessary and vital to our society's progression.

While public libraries will receive untaxed access at one computer inside of their respective buildings to all texts within Google's digital library, individuals will also have the option to buy online access to certain books.

What is viscerally at stake with this settlement is the public's interest. Google Books will now dwarf the Library of Congress, all libraries combined eventually, and any information collecting agency that has ever existed, concerning intellectual property.

On one hand, this could be great for students and scholars to have somewhat unprecedented access to obscure and out of print tomes for study and enlightenment, but on the other hand what if Google's rates become too high for Austin Community College, for instance, to afford subscriptions to their service. We would just get cut off from information that was maybe once obscure and unattainable, no big loss, but we could also be severed from basic amenities our library used to provide to us for the base fee of enrollment, like those wonderful search engines leading us to a wealth of scholarly material.

Google is a publicly traded company with interests, and a responsibility to their shareholders. Are those interests going to conflict with the publics interests?

Google has now placed itself in a position to own a stranglehold on the information world or usher in a revolutionary, undiscriminating and responsible dawn of a new age, the age of digitalization and concentration of once unavailable material to the greater public.

The frightening and binding language of the settlement will make it virtually impossible for those books under Google's copyright to ever be undone, and while it is projected that Google will be able to offer access to almost 20 percent of books ever copyrighted, that is a ridiculous amount of information for one private company to own rights to exclusively.

In The New York Review of Books on Feb. 12, Robert Darnton explained that "As the authors of the Constitution knew, copyright was created in Great Britain by the Statute of Anne in 1710 for the purpose of curbing the monopolistic practices of the London Stationers' Company and also, as its title proclaimed, 'for the encouragement of learning.' "

I don't feel, but I would like to think, that Google has enrichment and education at the core of its motivations, considering they are now in the same position, overtly, as Standard Oil was at the turn of the 19th century and the London Stationers' Company was at the turn of the 17th century. But these are not railroad rebates and inflated taxes that Google could possibly juke. No, this is public information brought to us by the tool that was supposed to champion and aggrandize unregulated information sharing, the Internet, not constrict and confine that information as a covertly trade-able commodity.

While the final ruling will come this summer, it looks inevitable that not much will be altered in the agreement and not ot mention that it will take years for Google to scan and digitize the wealth of books it projects to annex under its banner.

We as students, readers, consumers, professors, and writers are witnessing a move that is unprecedented in the publishing world, and Google could be a boon to institutions of learning or a bane to our inherent right to educate ourselves and consume intellectual property. Only time will tell.

Albert Camus; "The aim of art, the aim of a life can only to be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily."