In another blast at Google from Europe, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor has said, in a video podcast before the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair that :
“The German government has a clear position: copyrights have to be protected in the internet,” Merkel said, adding that there were “considerable dangers” for copyright protection in the internet.
Reuters adds the following sentence omitted by The Guardian: “That’s why we reject the scanning in of books without any copyright protection — like Google is doing. The government places a lot of weight on this position on copyrights to protect writers in Germany.”
You can read the full report at The Guardian or at the Reuters link above. In addition, as The Guardian and Reuters also mention, Google has been sued in France by an association of French publishers for violating their French copyrights in the digitization of their books. Substantial damages are requested.
No matter what we may think of the settlement, the international implications of the settlement are growing.
Perhaps she really meant…
“The German government has a clear position: DRM has to be protected in the internet … The government places a lot of weight on this position on DRM to protect big media corporations in Germany.”
If the judge’s remarks in last week’s hearing are any guide, he remains clueless about the international ramifications of this settlement, including the growing anger in Europe.
At that hearing, the judge raised no objections when the parties involved suggested that the changes they intend to make would not be major. That in itself, isn’t surprising. This is their settlement after all. After fussing over it for so long in secrecy, why would they want to change it? Google is driven by greed. The publisher’s organization is clueless. The Authors Guild has already demonstrate its zeal to betray authors worldwide to get it Book Rights Registry funded by Google. And the two sets of lawyers representing authors and publishers will get tens of millions from Google if a settlement goes through, so it isn’t hard to figure out who they’re really working for.
What is surprising is that the judge didn’t tell these parties otherwise. Instead, he seems to see all the letters from authors, particularly foreign authors, filed against the settlement as little more than a nuisance. He didn’t seem to know just how heavily those letters ran against the settlement, which suggests he hasn’t read them. Now, for the next stage, he wants to add an additional burden for the non-legal-procedure literate: requiring electronic filing only. That alone could get him into trouble if that is not already a policy for all court filings in his district. And even though the glaring faults of the previous settlement are unlikely to be fixed in the new settlement, the judge wants to exclude everything from the new round but objections directed at the (minor) changes. If that isn’t fixing the result, what is?
Keep in mind something else. Google was one of the largest corporate donors to the Obama campaign, giving over three times as much as the second largest largest donor in the Silicon Valley, Cisco. Google wants a payback for all that money and nothing in the next four years is likely to matter to them as much as this settlement.
The circumstances certainly justify suspicion of a political fix in the works. The very day before this last hearing, the White House formally announced that the judge in the case has been nominated for the appeals court. My own suspicion is that the “vetting” of this judge included remarks along the lines of, “Of course, with your new position, you’ll want to get this matter settled quickly won’t you?” To which the judge replied, “Yes.” Settling quickly is precisely the objective the judge is setting for this dispute, not fair, not equitable, not properly representative of those who will bear its impact. Just quick.
Those who think that an enormous, online digital library is important need to realize that the outrage from overseas when what Google is doing comes out is likely to result in such ill-will that creating a fair and equitable legal foundation for such a library will be set back for years, perhaps even a decade. For many foreign authors, burned by what Google wants to do, Rule One of any revision to the Berne Convention will be multiple provisions to strip Google of any advantages that it might derive from its schemes.
I’d hoped all the well-stated criticism the settlement received would mean that it was a dead letter. But with a judge who apparently has not read most of that criticism and who seems to have his focus on justifying to the Obama administration his upcoming promotion, I’ve become much more pessimistic. This matter could drag on for years, poisoning relationships around the world.
What Google wants to do could be the worst thing that could possibly happen to a vision of a globally available, widely inclusive digital library.
–Michael W. Perry