The Publishing Industry assault on Google Books

There has been much to do about the controversy over Google’s plans to create a digital database of library books belonging to various affiliated libraries willing to denote their contents to Google’s project. I suppose the issue comes down to the following significant - to varying degrees - concerns that run in contradiction to one another. On the one hand, some of the books that are published by Google in its service, Google Books, are the property of publishers. On the other hand, there is a public interest in making information as accessible as possible, reaching out to portions of the American public who might lack the resources or the affiliation with academic libraries required to acquire access to such published works.

I suppose it is not much of a guessing game to accurately predict my position on this issue. I value the benefits of an informed citizenry where wealth is not a prerequisite for the procurement of the necessary intellectual resources for one to elevate his or her understanding of matters of concern for the individual or for other segments of the population for whom the individual might empathize or sympathize.

Of course, we should not entirely ignore the plight of the publishers who have voiced opposition to Google’s rendering of the intellectual products of authors - who no longer own their own thoughts after entering into the agreements mandated by the Publishing Industry - in the form of digital media. There are entrenched conventions in our society concerning the parameters dictating the Fair Use of intellectual property when including it in other publications belonging to other agents not associated with the ownership of the published contents from which they draw resources. Also the stipulations of Fair Use are somewhat esoteric, they are certainly applicable to the case concerning Google Books, since only a page is displayed after an enduser clicks on a result generated from the text string entered in as the query. This is the primary argument deployed by Google in defense against the impending litigation levied by the Publishing Industry.

Although I do not want to diminish the significance of the legal nuance of the issue under discussion, I would like to introduce some additional considerations that might not be apropos in a strictly legalistic sense, but certainly salient in a larger context that includes broader social considerations that pertain to American society and the democracy that it is suppose to embody.

I would like to first mention that academic texts, of which I am primarily interested, are the products of academics who - for the most part - are employed by institutions that receive public resources; not to mention the tax exempt status they enjoy, which is a privilege that should not be conceived without any concomitant social responsibilities that ensue from this immunity from taxation. Therefore, since we as citizens partially - and probably to a large degree - fund the research that contributes to the production of many of the texts in question, it seems only reasonable that we should at least have access to the finished products of our funding. Parenthetically, at an University library, I raised such a point to a librarian with whom I was having a conversation, and she immediately turned argumentative insisting that the publishers were private entities and the works they published were extensions of their property. When I mentioned that the preponderance of research that goes into writing these works are publicly funded, she failed to construct a rebuttal, so, in order to alleviate the tension, I ended the sort lived debate by saying, “Well, it all depends upon your point of view.”

I suppose I narrated the preceding anecdote for the following purpose: It certainly does depend upon your point of view. If you think that private interests compelled by motivations solely related to profiteering take precedence over all other concerns, then, by all means, you should take issue with Google Books. However, if you are like me, and value the preservation and extension of democracy in American society - which is enhanced by the free flow of information and analysis - you might consider joining my ranks by supporting Google in its efforts, and, perhaps, on occasion, shed a crocodile tear for the Publishing Industry, when it laments the loss of its privatized, publicly funded, intellectual assets.

Russell Cole

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