Google, book search, copyright laws

Jeffrey Toobin has a very good article in the New Yorker about Google's Book Search project. One part of the project is about digitizing books in the university libraries of Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford and others. It has a similar program for new books which are already in digital form. Interestingly, publishers who are collaborating with Google on new books are suing the company over its library project! The US copyright law, which will have to be used for settling this dispute, is an ambiguous mess. Toobin sorts out the issues for us, and indicates that an out-of-court settlement is very likely. Here's the bottomline for the consumers:

But a settlement that serves the parties’ interests does not necessarily benefit the public. “It’s clearly in both sides’ interest to settle,” Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, said. “Businesses in Internet time can’t wait around for years for lawsuits to be resolved. Google wants to be able to get this done, and get permission to resume scanning copyrighted material at all the libraries. For the publishers, if Google gives them anything at all, it creates a practical precedent, if not a legal precedent, that no one has the right to scan this material without their consent. That’s a win for them. The problem is that even though a settlement would be good for Google and good for the publishers, it would be bad for everyone else.” [...]

... [A] settlement could insulate Google from competitors, which would be especially troubling, because the company has already proved that when it comes to searches it is not infallible. “Google didn’t get video search right—YouTube did,” Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, said. (Google solved that problem by buying YouTube last year for $1.6 billion.) “Google didn’t get blog search right—technorati.com did,” Wu went on. “So maybe Google won’t get book search right. But if they settle the case with the publishers and create huge barriers to newcomers in the market there won’t be any competition. That’s the greatest danger here.”