Interview: Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, says Google Print is dangerous because it will set a precedent for illegally duplicating copyrighted materials.The Association of American Publishers filed suit against Google last week, charging that the search king's online library program was instituting massive copyright infringement by copying published works without permission.
The suit came after discussions between Google management and the AAP broke down. The association had earlier supported a suit filed in September against Google by the Authors Guild, but the lawsuit filed last week is a separate one. Publishers objected to the opt-out nature of the program, which requires them to specify which books they don't want scanned in by Google.
In August, Google temporarily suspended the Google Print program until Nov. 1 after hearing complaints from publishers and authors alike. Last Tuesday, however, Google said it would expand the program to eight countries in Europe.
Publish.com spoke recently with AAP President and former Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder about the lawsuit.
Publish: The AAP had lengthy discussions with Google before announcing the lawsuit. Can you tell me a little bit about those discussions? What was Google's attitude?
Schroeder: As you know, almost a year ago Google was in Frankfurt and everyone, including publishers, was very happy about Google Print. And then a month or so later they announced Google Print Library, in which they announced they were going to copy all these library books without permission. That's when we contacted them and said hey, what's going on? That first meeting was held in the AAP offices in New York on July 1. CEO came with his team, including [director of content partnerships] Tim Gerber. We presented them with why we were concerned about copyright issues. Their complaint was that it was too hard to find out the copyright owner. And our reply was, it really isn't. Every book has an ISBN number. And this isn't a new thing, the system's been around for years. It's not like there isn't a quick and easy way. But they seemed to think that our system was somebody sitting in a room with catalog cards in a shoebox.
Several prominent critics have noticed that quite a few authors, especially less well-known authors, like the idea of Google Print and Google Print Library. They think Google Print will only raise awareness of their books. That doesn't sound like a bad thing.
Publishers think that too, but the law says that the author and the publisher get to make that decision, not Google. And there are some people who don't think that. Poets don't. Cookbook writers don't. People who write reference books don't. But that's not even the issue. The bigger issue is that if Google is allowed to unilaterally make copies of a copyrighted work, what's to stop someone else from coming in and doing it again, but this time making the whole work available?
So even though Google is only making a portion viewable, the precedent for large-scale distribution of copyrighted work is set?
Exactly. What Google is doing is not just copying once, they're copying twice. They give one to the library as compensation, and they take one with them. And they can do whatever they want with it. So then they said "we're just going to be making a kind of card index for books," which isn't true. An online index already exists anyway, so what would be the point?...I mean, we're not talking about Mother Theresa here. This is a huge company that will obviously be making money from this project, will obviously be selling advertising around it … If they can get away with this, then anybody can do this.
So Google's a big company. But aren't the publishing houses owned by large multibillion corporations themselves, like TimeWarner, Viacom and Newscorp?
Yes, but the publishing houses themselves are very small. And you could combine all the publishing houses in the world and they wouldn't equal the size of Google. Their business model—and I give them credit for building a great search engine—their business model is to take other people's stuff and sell advertising around it. Eventually what's got to happen is there has to be a way to get money back to the copyright holder.
The societal trend seems to be toward free content. File-sharing, bittorrent, music downloads—even daily newspapers are given away free. Is there a sense that the AAP is fighting a losing battle here?
No, no. I know what you're trying to say. Publishers are totally into the Internet. They're very into the digital age. They don't own printing companies and they don't own presses, so the issue isn't paper versus digital. The issue is simply you have to pay authors for what they write. There just has to be some revenue stream or business model that works that way. America has always provided the highest quality reference book and journals. We don't want to see the quality go away. And that's what will happen if Google is allowed to change the law. There has to be a way to compensate the author and the publisher. If it ends up being ad revenue sharing, fine. If it ends up being pay-per-view, fine. But it has to be something.
Online Media 
