Google has reached a settlement agreement with the Author’s Guild on its class-action lawsuit over the use of copyrighted material in Google Book Search. The agreement still has to be approved by the courts, but under its terms, Google will create a $125 million fund to launch a Book Rights Registry that will compensate authors and publishers for the use of copyrighted material, share advertising revenue, and offer access to copyrighted material through a pay service. Google also plans to expand access to out-of-print books, and the deal apparently includes “provisions for institutional subscriptions that would allow libraries to share collections online and mandates at least one free access terminal in public libraries.”
This last provision strikes me as crucial, since it strikes a balance between the project’s profit-motive, to create a vast new electronic distribution network for ideas and information under a single company’s commercial control, and its more idealistic goal of creating an easily accessible universal library for the broader benefit of the human species. That personality split has defined the project from its inception, leading to the creation of not-for-profit alternatives like the Open Content Alliance, which seek to make library collections more broadly available without commercial restrictions. In a sense, though, this split defines the whole history of writing and publishing: on the one hand, it’s a business, since writers need a way to make a living from their work, but on the other hand, it’s a form of prophecy, the most immediate way ??? beyond the passing on of our genetic material — that we contribute to the evolution of our species.
Profit or prophet? Ideally, we shouldn’t have to decide between them, but it’s rare that idealism pays the rent, so we need to find ways to strike a balance. Google has deep pockets and (I’m told) good intentions, so it makes sense that they initiated this massive and expensive project of producing the universal library. It has a pyramid-builder’s ambition to it, the kind of project ??? like railways or highway systems or clean water ??? that will define an age for those who come after by spreading the intellectual wealth across the planet. But only if there’s provision for broad public access: free terminals in public libraries, subsidies for students, easy access in the Third World. To make the universal library simply a commercial asset is to miss our prophetic moment: knowledge and culture have historically been luxuries, but as with the spread of literacy in the 20th Century, we have a chance now to make them the foundation of our next wave of innovation and development. And from that, we’ll all profit.