Lessig Warns that Google Deal Would Pave Way for Metered Access to Culture
More balanced public policy necessary, but hard to achieve
-- Library Journal, 01/28/2010
- Sees some pluses in settlement
- Says criticisms miss larger point
- Major changes in law and culture needed
In a New Republic essay headlined For the Love of Culture: Google, copyright, and our future, Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig outlines the larger issue in the Google Book Search settlement: the dangerous precedent it sets for metered access to books and other cultural creations, as with the documentary films, where it is costly and time-consuming to clear rights.
He acknowledges that "[t]here is much to praise in this settlement," including the fact that "[t]he deal Google struck guaranteed the public more free access to free content than 'fair use' would have done." As for the critics of the settlement, he says to look at the larger issue:
The main thrust in almost all of these attacks, however, misses the real reason to be concerned about the future that this settlement will build. For the problem here is not just antitrust; it is not just privacy; it is not even the power that this (enormously burdensome) free library will give this already dominant Internet company. Indeed, the problem with the Google settlement is not the settlement. It is the environment for culture that the settlement will cement. For it practically guarantees that we will repeat the cultural-environmental errors of our past, by now turning books into documentary film.Is there a solution?
... For rather than a relatively simple rule about how much of a book you get for free, and when you have to pay, the actual terms are enormously complex. Whether a book is “free” depends upon the kind of book it is. Journals have a different rule from regular books. Books with pictures have a different rule again.
The deal constructs a world in which control can be exercised at the level of a page, and maybe even a quote. It is a world in which every bit, every published word, could be licensed. It is the opposite of the old slogan about nuclear power: every bit gets metered, because metering is so cheap. We begin to sell access to knowledge the way we sell access to a movie theater, or a candy store, or a baseball stadium. We create not digital libraries, but digital bookstores: a Barnes & Noble without the Starbucks.
Lessig suggests legal changes to make the copyright system more efficient and to simiplify rights, and a balance between the approach of copyright abolitionists and the content industry "that seeks to license every single use of culture."
He's not that optimistic:
The idea of balanced public policy in this area will strike many as oxymoronic. It is thus no wonder, perhaps, that the likes of Google sought progress not through better legislation, but through a clever kludge, enabled by genius technologists. But this is too important a matter to be left to private enterprises and private deals. Private deals and outdated law are what got us into this mess. Whether or not a sensible public policy is possible, it is urgently needed.
