Why we believe in Google Print
Posted by David Drummond, General
Counsel and Vice President, Corporate Development
We've been asked recently why we're so determined to pursue
Google Print, even though it has drawn industry opposition in the
form of two lawsuits, the most recent coming today from several
members of the
American Association of Publishers. The answer is that this
program, which will make millions of books easier for everyone in
the world to find, is crucial to our company's mission.
We're dedicated to helping the world find information, and
there's too much information in books that cannot yet be found
online. We think you should be able to search through every word of
every book ever written, and come away with a list of relevant
books to buy or find at your local library. We aim to make that
happen, but to do so we'll need to build and maintain an index
containing all this information.
It's no surprise that this idea makes some publishers nervous,
even though they can easily remove their books from the program at
any time. The history of technology is replete with advances that
first met wide opposition, later found wide acceptance, and finally
were widely regarded as having been inevitable all along. In 1982,
for instance, the president of the Motion Picture Association of
America famously told a Congressional panel that "the VCR is
to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston
Strangler is to the woman home alone." But Sony, makers of the
original Betamax, stood its ground, the Supreme Court ruled that
copying a TV show to watch it later was
legal, and today videotapes and DVDs produce the lion's
share of the film industry's revenue.
We expect Google Print will follow a similar storyline. We believe
that our product is legal (see
Eric Schmidt's recent op-ed), that the courts will
vindicate this position, and that the industry will come to embrace
Google Print's considerable benefits. Even today, despite its
lawsuit, the AAP itself recognizes this potential. The Google Print
Library Program, AAP president Pat Schroeder said this morning,
"could help many authors get more exposure and maybe even sell
more books.” We look forward to the day that the program's
opponents marvel at the fact that they actually tried to stop an
innovation that, by making books as easy to find as web pages,
brought their works to the attention of a vast new global audience.
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