Bernstein Bares It All

If you have any objections to the settlement struck between Google Books Search and the publishing industry, you better send it out soon. All objections must be postmarked May 5, 2009 or earlier. And objections, of course, are being raised from all sides.

The settlement has been under fire from the moment it was signed into existence. Aimed to clear up a 3-year-old class action suit accusing Google of copyright infringement, the terms of the agreement go beyond merely settling the accusations, setting the stage for Google Book Search to become the biggest library in the world. It cedes to Google the digital rights to all “orphan books,” any book still copyrighted but out-of-print, without a publisher or an author claiming royalties. Millions upon millions of these books can be found in university and national libraries throughout the world. Furthermore, the agreement permits Google to continue to digitize copyright-protected books on the condition that they charge for access and give 63% of the revenue generated to the copyright holders, represented by a new organization that the settlement creates, the “Book Rights Registry.”

No one seems too satisfied with this. Harvard Professor of History and Director of the Harvard University Library Robert Darnton has some serious problems with it, because he believes that commercial interests will pervert what could have been a great public good: a freely accessed database containing all of the world’s knowledge. Numerous authors have voiced dissatisfaction with the terms, believing the $125 million that Google paid them in the settlement to make amends for copyright infringement and the future revenue sharing agreement is unfair and that the license-by-default (authors have to opt out by May 2010 to not be included in the database) is illegal. Consumer Watchdog and Internet Archives have both filed suits objecting to the settlement based upon antitrust law.

However, amidst all the uproar, and the settlement’s 134 pages of legalese, a real issue has been ignored. No one has questioned the good of the digital library. The worry is that a commercial digital database will ultimately be damaging. However, history has shown that even a freely accessed digital library would not be what we want.

Throughout history, storehouses of knowledge have never managed to be unadulterated houses of knowledge. Ulterior motives have always lurked amidst the stacks. France’s Bibliothèque Nationale served to consolidate the rule of the people during the French Revolution, asserting the power of the masses by, in the name of knowledge, seizing all of the private collections of the First and Second Estates. What has been considered the first public library, the library of San Marco, founded by Cosimo de’ Medici in 1444, was created as power publicity, as a means of instituting the Medici’s dominance in Florence. Even the Library of Alexandria was not born out of benevolence. Ptolemy Soter starved out Athens until it relinquished its knowledge to his desires to build the greatest library ever, a repository of humanity’s cultural production that would endow his Alexandria with the wisdom of the world. While scholars from throughout the world were allowed to come and study at the library, texts were not to be shared with other countries. The Ptolemies banned the exportation of papyrus and confiscated many a scroll from Alexandria’s visitors. Why should the fact of power melt away now, just because we’ve changed mediums from the physical to the digital?

Power relations are implicated in any library, when knowledge is concentrated under the auspices of any single force. Google Book Search really does not change the game. It merely translates the outdated paradigm of musty tomes and card catalogs to the internet age. The library we want is not a public library funded by the government or a benevolent nonprofit, but rather a decentralized network of peer-to-peer sharing, with works freely copied, perhaps even illegally copied. So file your objections, bibliophiles! For the sake of libraries, for the sake of books, for freedom’s sake.

—Staff Writer Sanders I. Bernstein can be reached at sbernst@fas.harvard.edu