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When it's good to be sued
February 02, 2007
When Jeffrey Toobin visited Google to do some interviews for an article on the company's plan to scan all the world's books into its database, an article that appears in this week's New Yorker, it happened to be Pajama Day at the Googleplex. "When I met with Sergey Brin," Toobin reports, "he was wearing bright-blue p.j.s, with the company’s logo stitched on the breast pocket."
A group of book publishers has sued Google, claiming its practice of scanning out-of-print-but-still-under-copyright books is illegal. The publishers are seeking to halt the Google project. Except, as Toobin makes clear, that's not really their goal. What they really want is a share of the money Google makes from its Book Search service. Although the service is not particularly lucrative at the moment, Brin believes it will, like Web Search, turn out "to be a great way to make money." Marissa Mayer, the Google executive who oversees Book Search, says that the lawsuits "are a business negotiation that happens to be going on in the courts. We think of it as a business negotiation that has a large legal-system component to it.”
Getting sued as part of a business negotiation may seem unpleasant, but it's not a bad thing for Google. In fact, it's probably a good thing. What it does is raise the stakes for any other company that might want to create a service to compete with Google Book Search. The prospect of getting sued and having to fork out a generous settlement, as Google will, in due course, almost certainly do, is a very good barrier to competition. As Larry Lessig tells Toobin: "“If Google says to the publishers, ‘We’ll pay,’ that means that everyone else who wants to get into this business will have to say, ‘We’ll pay.’ The publishers will get more than the law entitles them to, because Google needs to get this case behind it. And the settlement will create a huge barrier for any new entrants in this field.”
Today, Viacom demanded that Google remove some 100,000 YouTube video clips that have been pirated from Viacom TV shows. "After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users," Viacom said. This, too, is part of a negotiation that will, in due course, almost certainly lead to an agreement in which Google compensates copyright owners in some fashion. And as with the negotiation with publishers, the travails that Google goes through will serve as a warning - and a competitive barrier - to would-be rivals to YouTube. In the end, messy fights may simply help Google lock up the market.
Toobin reports that, other than Brin, not many people bothered to wear their pajamas to work on Pajama Day. "Most of the rank and file," he writes, "saw the stunt for the manufactured fun that it was. They came to work in their usual slacker uniforms of jeans and T-shirts - which are, in their way, as conformist as white shirts and ties were at I.B.M. in the nineteen-sixties. Google, as its employees seem to recognize, cannot pretend to be anything other than a large and powerful corporation."
Comments
Pardon the derail, but I sincerely wish someone would look at what Google is up to somewhat similarly with bioinformatics. Someone needs to see what they are doing with Genbank/NCBI, which is publically funded, and Craig Venter (of Celera etc). Sergei's fiance is planning a personal screening service (http://23andme.com) and using Google's backend they'll be looking to index genomes. The holy grail being early drug discovery. But the advent of Google and bioinf I find worrisome. Posting here only because you might actually agree. Thanks.
Posted by: Adam MacDonald ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.roughtype.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 3, 2007 10:09 AM
Some collateral damage from the Viacom lawsuit.
Posted by: Phil at February 5, 2007 07:00 AM
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