Action on Authors' Rights

The UK Government and the Google Book Settlement

Most professional authors with active careers who have looked into the detail of the Google Book Settlement have reacted with alarm and anxiety.
Debate among them has focused chiefly on the best way to prevent Google Inc. from displaying or selling their books without authorization: whether it is better for authors to opt out and rely on copyright law, or register their books and invoke the provisions in the Settlement Agreement for having them removed.

The main UK authors’ organizations have hailed the Settlement as a positive development and advised opting in.
The Society of Authors has been markedly vague, much of the time, about the contents of the Settlement Agreement. More than once when it has ventured into specifics it has shown itself to be troublingly confused.
As for the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS): it has been facing an uncertain future with the decline of the photocopier. It has welcomed the Google Book Settlement in terms that suggest that it sees a new licensing opportunity, administering UK authors’ payments from the planned Book Rights Registry.

Meanwhile, UK authors have been asking: where is the government in all this? Why isn’t it taking action to protect our rights?
The governments of France and Germany sent briefs to the court urging the rejection of the settlement. The government of India made diplomatic representations to the government of the United States.

In recent weeks, the sorry truth has been emerging: in Britain the New Labour government supports the Google Book Settlement, and has done from the start.

In an article in the Times in November 2008 David Lammy, Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property, hailed the Google Book Settlement as:

[a deal that has] the potential to streamline the administration of copyright in the digital age … an evolution in the way copyright licensing for printed works is administered and a revolution in the freedom of access to harder-to-find works.

This op-ed by Mr Lammy was drawn to my attention by officials at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) at a meeting on Monday 25 January. The meeting was set up by two intellectual property lawyers from London solicitors Olswang, Mark Devereux and Clive Gringras. They took along with them my agent Meg Davis and me: not as clients but in order that we might contribute to the discussion on the basis of our knowledge of and deep concern about the Google Book Settlement and our experience of how the book industry works.

The following points are among those that emerged at the meeting:

· From the point of view of IPO and the government, the GBS model of digital publishing is one that is ‘in principle worth looking at’.
· ‘Improving access to digital content’ is perceived as immensely important, and there is held to be a ‘logjam’ in delivering this, which the mechanism of the GBS dislodges. (I challenged the existence of such a logjam in the meeting.)
· There is a perception that licensing works for use is currently ‘too complicated’.
· On the whole idea of the GBS and the way it is set up to operate: when they looked into it they found ‘nothing so offensive about it that we would unhesitatingly condemn it’.

We were told that our group was far more hostile towards and critical of the GBS than anyone else they had talked to.

The Publishers’ Association (PA) and the ALCS have been lobbying for the GBS: no big surprises there. I didn’t get it clear whether the Society of Authors had made direct representations, but IPO were aware that the SoA broadly supports the GBS. IPO has not taken steps to consult widely among authors, but has been taking a kind of ’straw poll’ of various authors who have passed its portals in recent months: we were told that all of them said that the GBS sounded like a good idea. (I suspect none of them had read the agreement.)

The big issue for IPO seemed to be the support for the settlement that had been expressed from the publishers’ side. This accords with a statement from Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (DBIS), reported by The Bookseller on 4 February. Confirming ‘that the government would not be lodging an objection to the settlement’, the spokesperson was reported as saying that ‘it was “right” that the Publishers Association “leads in this process”‘.
The government is all too plainly in need of assistance to get its collective head round the fact that copyrights belong to authors, not publishers; for the most part publishers only license them.
It also ought to be asking the PA some tough questions about the secret side-deal between Google and the big publishing corporations; but more on that in a later post.

Read the full piece at Action on Authors' Rights