"To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." These noble words are from Google’s mission statement.

With its famous “Don’t be evil” slogan, and its snack bowls of M&Ms for employees, Google has managed to retain a cuddly, friendly kind of image; certainly not a regular corporation that would organize the world’s information and make as much money out of it as humanly possible.

Back in 2004, Google began one of its more ambitious information-organizing projects: scanning the entire contents of millions of out-of-print books and making them available online. One rather large problem was that it didn’t go to the – quite considerable – trouble of asking the authors or publishers of these books for their permission to do so.

Predictably enough, not everybody whose work has been digitized is enamored with the Google Books project, leading to claims of copyright infringement and concerns about a global centralized electronic library controlled by a private company.

Google’s response, with the support of the Authors' Guild and the Association of American Publishers, is a scheme to compensate copyright holders for use of their work. The Google Book Settlement – at almost 400 pages, longer than many of the books that have been scanned – offers rights holders $60 per book and 63 percent of ad revenue and digital sales generated.

The settlement also gave authors the option of opposing it, and/or opting out of the scheme by Sept. 4. With digitization of printed matter an apparent inevitability, wouldn’t a new revenue stream from books that are, for the most part, currently not generating any, be welcomed?
On Sept. 3, the day before the objection/opt-out deadline, two journalists and writers whose works have been scanned by Google, came to the FCCJ to explain why they oppose the settlement.

Fumiaki Fukuda and Shojiro Akashi reject Google’s claim of “fair use” and maintain the scanning of their works constitutes a violation of copyright law. Akashi pointed out that Japanese copyright offenses come under the penal code, and that they have both filed complaints with the Metropolitan Police Department in Tokyo requesting that Google and its CEO be criminally charged.

Rights-holders who object to the settlement are expected to join what amounts to a class-action suit filed against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“Class actions are for victims, and the basic premise must be that every victim of this copyright violation must be notified properly. This hasn’t happened in Japan,” said Akashi.

Akashi also laid out his objections to the Book Rights Registry, the organization to be set up in New York to administer the distribution of royalties from Google’s new digital depository of books.

“The registry will be dominated by the U.S., and the rights of others, including Japanese, will not be protected properly,” according to Akashi, who also questioned the “10 to 20 percent admin fees that the registry will take from the royalties.”

The increased danger of piracy, which has become an even bigger problem for music and movies since digitization, was raised by Akashi, though he later stated he was not anti-digitization per se.

Finding himself unable to make contact with Google’s U.S. headquarters, Fumiaki Fukuda wrote repeated letters to Google Japan CEO Koichiro Tsujino asking that his book be removed from the company’s digital library. He said that Google did eventually heed his request, though it would not confirm it had deleted the scanned data. Fumiaki denied being against the digitization of books, but said he would never now do a deal with Google after what has happened.

An umbrella group opposed to the settlement – the Open Book Alliance – which, perhaps unsurprisingly, includes a number of Google’s business rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft, has also filed its objections in New York. The alliance, which also includes academic institutions and public libraries, has its own online depository, and voices concerns over a global Google copyright monopoly on digitized print archives. ❶