Scan, Copy, Pirate

I don’t quite remember when I first heard about downloading music. It was somewhere in my early high school years that a friend first showed me his vast catalogue of illegally procured tunes. This was indeed the Holy Grail: a never-ending supply of music was just waiting to be pulled from an immense, digital horn-of-plenty, and my iMac was my very own, blueberry-flavored ticket to sonic heaven.

What ultimately stopped me from acting out my peer-to-peer fantasies was not the illegality of what I was proposing to do. Even if I had realized that downloading was tantamount to digital piracy, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference—being a pirate ranked prominently among my list of career aspirations well into my freshman year of college.

Instead, the lack of reliable file-sharing programs for the Macintosh platform and the terrible lethargy of contemporary dial-up download times were enough to convince me to abstain from music sharing altogether. I borrowed compact discs from friends and listened to them the not-so-old-fashioned way.

So you can imagine why my attitude toward Google’s latest online venture might be a little more curmudgeonly than others.

Google’s Library Project—an effort to create a massive, searchable, online compendium of large portions of the collections of some of the world’s greatest academic libraries (including Harvard’s)—stands to revolutionize the way that books are read, research is conducted, and written knowledge is disseminated across the world. But the manner in which Google has thus far undertaken the project flagrantly disregards the rights of the authors and publishers whose work stands to be digitized. As a result, publishers have sued Google in a number of jurisdictions, charging the corporation with copyright violations.

That there is a possibility that these publishers could succeed in putting the brakes on what ought to be considered a thoroughly useful venture is extremely regrettable, but the fault is not theirs to bear. Rather, it’s Google that needs to change its policy on copyright from an opt-out system, in which publishers are assumed to have given permission for their books to be copied unless they specifically state otherwise, to an opt-in process, which puts control over copyrighted works safely in the hands of copyright holders. While the current system may be convenient for the multi-billion dollar e-giant, it can’t continue if publishers are to be appeased and the threat of injunction is to be diminished.

It’s pretty clear from their unwillingness to back down in the face of intense pressure from the publishing industry that Google is confident that it can win in court. The company asserts that the project is covered by the fair use provision of copyright law, and that the permission of copyright holders is, therefore, not needed. They do, indeed, make a strong case: users of the library project will only be able to see snippets of books under copyright, and the works will be displayed with links to booksellers where they can be purchased. Then there’s the dangerously compelling argument that the project, by disseminating literature to people and places that would otherwise not have access to it, a greater human interest is served.

As far as snippets and purchase options are concerned, these ought to be considered necessary in any case, if the project is to avoid slipping completely into the realm of the positively piratical. They fail to account, however, for a truly fundamental precondition for Google’s distributing printed material in this way—that, in the default situation, control remains firmly in the hands of the authors and publishers who own the copyrights of the books in question. Google’s opt-out proposition takes that basic control away from those to whom it rightfully belongs, compromising, in my non-expert estimation, the spirit—if not also the letter—of copyright laws.

When it comes to the argument for the dissemination of information, it’s very easy to fall into excessively idealism. In reality, the library project doesn’t seek to make the vast majority of recent academic work (journal articles and the like) available, probably because most scholarly journals already digitize their content—with their authors’ consent. And as for the great classics of world literature? Most of those are already in the public domain and wouldn’t require a publisher’s permission anyway.

When my high school classmates filled their hard drives with hordes of pirated music, videos, and software, they broke the law. Now, in digitizing thousands of books without the express consent of their copyright holders, Google stands to do the same. Because their ends are so good, and because a single court victory could jeopardize the entire project, it is in everyone’s best interest that Google back down and give authors and publishers their due.

After all, what good has really ever come of piracy?



Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.