omega blog

Six years later (that's now), Google plans to have about 10 million volumes of digital copies of various publications by 2015. It's obvious that many authors and publishers will raise an eyebrow (or maybe both) at this. So how does Google plan to keep them all quiet? With money of-course!

The court settlement requires Google to set up a $125 million Books Rights Registry. Authors have an option of opting in to be a part of the registry, giving the publication rights to Google. The authors would get a 'one-off' chunk from the $125 million but no proceeds from the sales of their publication thereafter. The authors who don't like the whole idea MUST opt out before January 2010 to ensure Google doesn't scan any of their publications.

If you're an author, the choice seems fairly simple - opt out and keep the right to yourself. However, knowing how Google web-services become popular, the authors stand a fair chance of losing out on sales anyway. Although Google is kind of breaching copyright laws by making money from someone else's work, they are making the world's information "universally accessible and useful" - one of their original mottos (ironically, the other one was "Don't be evil").

So if you're Dan Brown and you know people will pay for every book you write (even if they're just about destroying historical monuments to solve a puzzle), you'd opt out and keep your work away from the Stanford graduates. However, if you're an average literature graduate trying to make a name for yourself, you'd opt in to the Books Rights Registry to make a few quick bucks, get some free PR and help keep the world's information universally accessible and useful.