As dreams go, this was supersized. All that Google wanted to do was to build the world’s largest digital library. Back in 2004, before the Kindle and ebooks, the dream appealed to many—especially Google’s focus on making out-of-print books available to anyone who wanted them.
The big issue wasn’t whether the world needed a digital library. It was whether that library should be owned by any one company, even a company that enjoyed the trust and goodwill Google did at the time; and what the building of the new Alexandria would do to copyright.
Over the next six years, Google’s battle became an increasingly arcane legal one, with publishers, authors and other “shareholders” taking positions in the legal war that followed. Last week, a US federal judge passed a landmark judgement, negating an agreement between a coalition of publishers and authors and Google that would have given the company the right to continue with the Google Library Project.
If the agreement had been found legal, Google would have been able to continue the work it does on Google Books — where it shares snippets from works in and out of copyright — and would, more significantly, have been able to stake claim to owning the copyright of thousands of “orphan” works: books where the author or other copyright holders are untraceable.
As it stands, the status of the roughly 15 million volumes already scanned by Google is in question and the company will need to work out a new agreement with publishers and authors.
Beyond the legal battles, there are two major questions raised by the Google Library Project. Those who believe that information should be free, and that knowledge should be available to all are right when they argue that the construction of a digital, free library is a good thing.
Currently, physical books and physical libraries reach only a relatively privileged few; the building and maintaining of libraries is not an easy task, and large parts of the world live in conditions of what has been described as book hunger, or book famine.
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The existence of a common digital library, from which books could be downloaded, printed freely and distributed, is light years away from the idea that knowledge should be available only for a few initiates, that books and manuscripts are the preserve of the Brahmins. If we don’t trust Google — and there is no good reason to hand over the keys to the digital kingdom to any one company, no matter how well-intentioned — there has to be another way to build a library the world can use.
At present, university libraries and some countries have taken the initiative, and are attempting to replicate Google’s initiative. (India is not yet one of them — we believe, by and large, in keeping books under lock and key, sadly.)
The other question is a large and difficult one: what happens to copyright? A system of rights invented in 1709 and based on the principle of territory — an author/publisher holds and sells rights to their work across a certain geographically-defined locale — is unlikely to survive the digital age, no matter how hard publishers work on digital rights management. Often, the copyright debate has been reduced to banalities.
Those who want a world where books are freely and easily available often ignore the rights of the author to profit from his or her work. Those who want to protect territorial copyright ignore the technological advances that would allow books to be instantly available, at cheaper prices, anywhere in the world — and ignore the growing public demand to break down the geographical system of copyright.
As the Chinese search engine behemoth Baidu discovered this week, you cannot dismantle copyright without the consent of the original copyright holders. Baidu has had to apologise and promise to remove books that were made available without the consent of the authors/ publishers on its Wenku platform after Chinese authors accused them of gross copyright infringement.
We are at an impasse — you cannot protect author’s rights without protecting territorial copyright under the present system, and you cannot give readers what they want without dismantling territorial copyright. In essence, we are trying to use a bullock cart on a Formula One track, and it isn’t working.
The lawyers on both sides will probably spend the next few years going back and forth trying to work out a settlement that satisfies both sides. But until we accept that a system designed for the realities of the 18th century marketplace isn’t going to work in the increasingly digitally fluid world of the 21st century, readers and authors alike will lose out. We need, as they said in the film Jaws many years ago, a bigger boat.