11/10/06

The independent has an excellent analysis of the ‘new google’; and raises the point that Google is, to traditional media company perspectives, “building a rival media empire under the guise of “organising the world’s information”", and that this empire effectively tramples all over copyright.

Of course, if a media / ad company made all of its money by infringing copyright (the extrapolation of this thought process goes) be it through film (e.g. on something like YouTube), books (by something not dissimilat to say Google Book search), music in something else (let’s say Google finds a way to index song lyrics or tonal progressions) or newspapers - then they wouldn’t last a minute against lawyers. But, to say that one is ’searching’ this content and helping it to find a bigger, albeit *mediated* audience - well, that makes it OK:

“What characterises Google is its very aggressive approach to copyright law,” said Lee Bromberg, a partner at the Boston-based law firm Bromberg & Sunstein. “My own view, as someone who often defends intellectual property, is that in every area where Google has pushed it has been over the line, but it has an interesting carrot-and-stick approach.

“The carrot is your content gets to be displayed to Google’s vast army of users, which increases rather than diminishes its commercial value to you. The stick is that it says it is just going to access your content as part of the plan to control and organise our knowledge, and that it is up to you to opt out. Well, you can’t burden the copyright holder with an obligation to demand their content is not used.”

Of course, by having started ‘organising’ the information on the web - with shady copyright and, let’s face it, a structure that really needed organising, these credentials are plausible.

The article goes on in more detail about the legalities of the Book Search programme, and the suits against Google. The result, as is the thrust of the piece, is the conciliatory stance made by Google in the context of threats from endeavours such as ACAP - an industry wide automated content access protection (hence the name) that, like a massive robots.txt file, tells the search engines what they can and can’t use on their own sites from the source they are indexing.

In this article is the kernal of the very future of the web, and how it’s going to get complicated and down to som every tiny details. Very big details of course are that Google fundamentally makes its money from other peoples content. They didn’t ask ‘web masters’ to opt in when they started to index web content - and from one perspective violated web copyright when they started indexing and ranking pages as a search. But at the same time, they provided a service (search - or rather, find) that was patchy at best before. And the argument is that they are continuing to do that, but across much more complex fields with many long-establlished and well thought-through approaches the copyright than, ‘cool, someone found me on google’, which is ho wit used to be.

Revenue sharing - and apparently generous (50:50) ones at that - are at the heart of the Google offering, and of course their money (cited in the article as $16m a day - a day! - from adverts) only works because they effectively control access to the whole web by aggregating every page. It’s a service, and an attractive one on paper. But, the realities of it can be very different. Richard Charkin has been posting about the google ads he has (controversially) placed on his blog.

Charkin, as former President of the Publishers Association, and CEO of one of the big 5 publishing houses in the UK, has met Google a number of times and reading between the lines, is pretty unimpressed with them and their approach top pretty much everything. That aside, his traffic is respectable (much mopre than here, for sure) and yet the total he has made from Google ads on his site is $30. Whilst you can’t claim revenue until you exceed $100, he did just receive £0.40 as a test of his banking details…

This won’t be the last we hear of this by a long stretch. Read the piece in full.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Copyright, Google print, Publishing, Web.