{"id":130,"date":"2005-10-20T18:20:17","date_gmt":"2005-10-21T00:20:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=130"},"modified":"2005-10-20T18:20:17","modified_gmt":"2005-10-21T00:20:17","slug":"i_work_for_goog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=130","title":{"rendered":"I work for Google"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I wish they would just die, because I so detest how they’re exploiting the web.” That’s Dave Winer<\/a> writing today about his reaction to Google’s use of its toolbar to manipulate the content of web pages. Google’s shareholders probably have a very different view of the company at the moment, as the Internet Goliath just announced a sevenfold increase<\/a> in profits during the last quarter, pushing its stock price up sharply.<\/p>\n

But the irascible Winer is not the only one complaining about Google’s increasing control over who sees what on the web when – and where the resulting money flows. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has just joined the Authors Guild in suing Google<\/a> over its ongoing effort to scan the world’s books into its vast database and serve up their pages as search results. John Battelle, author of a new book about Google<\/a>, yesterday dismissed the lawsuit<\/a> as a reactionary move – “their legacy business model is imperiled, and they fear change” – but today, after speaking with the AAP, he changed his tune<\/a> a bit: “Google is doing this so as to make its own index superior, and to gain competitive advantage over others. That leaves a bad taste in the publisher’s mouths.”<\/p>\n

As a book author and blog writer, I have mixed feelings about Google’s power. On the one hand, a good case can be made that Google is making commercial use of people’s intellectual property without fully compensating – or even informing – them. (I realized only today that it has scanned my book into its database and is serving it up in five-page chunks. No one told me.) On the other hand, I know that if my content wasn’t in Google’s database, traffic to my site would dry up, and I might – though I’m not sure about this – lose out on a few book sales. And, beyond my own petty interests, effective searching lies at the heart of the web’s value. Disrupting the status quo could have nasty consequences. Whether I like it or not, I work for Google.<\/p>\n

The stakes here could get very high. Kevin Werbach<\/a> argues today that the “battle” between Google and the publishers could pose a “challenge to the stability of the Internet as we know it.” That’s because it brings to the surface some tough copyright issues that have long been submerged. As Werbach writes, “On some level, copying a Web page to facilitate searching isn’t all that different from copying a book to facilitate searching. And copying an RSS feed to put content onto another site isn’t so different either. Unravel the notion that some content sharing benefits everyone, and therefore should be acceptable despite the nominal boundaries of intellectual property, and the Internet economy, especially the Web 2.0 economy, comes crashing down.”<\/p>\n

It is a little scary, but so is an increasingly contentious, and arguably unfair, status quo. It may be that the conflict will stir up some constructive, innovative ways to compensate content creators for the intellectual property used by Google and other companies. Perhaps a rights organization, like ASCAP in the music world, could be established to track the use of online content, collect reasonable fees and funnel a bit of money back to the creators. Or maybe, as Winer suggests, the best solution lies in simply adopting an opt-in model for many search-related services. As a first step toward a just resolution of the issue, it would be helpful if Google stopped acting as though it’s doing the Lord’s work<\/a> and anyone standing in its way is a benighted Luddite. Just because you do no evil doesn’t mean you do good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I wish they would just die, because I so detest how they’re exploiting the web.” That’s Dave Winer writing today about his reaction to Google’s use of its toolbar to manipulate the content of web pages. Google’s shareholders probably have a very different view of the company at the moment, as the Internet Goliath just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}