Monthly Archives: November 2009

Google Books/CNET

“Two Cheers for Google Books,” CNET, November 16, 2009. Larry’s support for the Google Books Settlement following its revision highlights the real source of objections to the original: the out-of-control copyright system. The settlement would bring back to life millions of out-of-print books, but that forest is getting lost in the trees of a variety of interested third parties with competitive, regulatory, or just plain loopy axes to grind.

An Unpopular View of Google Books

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I’m starting to feel like the only person who thinks the Google Books settlement with authors and publishers is a good deal. One voice that seems not to be heard, however, over the din of Google competitors, panicky law professors, and regulators who wouldn’t know a workable solution to a copyright problem (created by regulators) if it bit them, is anyone speaking for consumers.

My opinion piece today on CNET argues that the real problem with the settlement has nothing to do with the 165-page document, which is increasingly coming to look like the sausage-making that it is.  (Does anyone really expect authors or publishers or anyone other than lawyers to read this and make any sense of it?)  The problem is the insanity of “modern” copyright law, which grants endless rights to all content creators, rights only the richest media companies can enforce.

For everyone else, once the modest commercial life of a work has ended, the rights are abandoned but not eliminated, leaving a no-man’s land of millions of stranded or “orphaned” works. The Google Books settlement, at least for digital users, would elegantly solve the orphan works problem. But the Copyright Office and the Department of Justice, among other creators of this mess, don’t like having their authority stepped on or their difficulties made to look easy.

As I write in Law Seven of “The Laws of Disruption”, a few basic reforms would bring copyright not only into balance but also into the reality of the 21st century. Until that happens, Google has done a good deed, which so far has not gone unpunished.

The Big Money/Bilski

“Can You Patent a Cat and a Laser Pointer?” The Big Money from Slate.com, Nov. 9, 2009. Larry’s article on the U.S. Supreme Court’s critical 2009 patent case, Bilski v. Kappos, explained why a challenge to business method patents was really one that asked the fundamental questions about patents for all kinds of information age inventions, especially software. Larry’s advice to the Justices: eliminate patent protection for inventions that don’t need it.

E Week/Google Phone

“Tense Times for Web Phone Apps” eWeek, Oct. 4, 2009. Larry’s blog on Net Neutrality was quoted in this article by Clint Boulton on AT&T’s objections to Google Phone’s non-carrier behavior. “In that issue, I’ve already written that I don’t think Google Voice should get a free pass, and it turns out I’m not the only one who feels this way. Larry Downes, a fellow at the Stanford Law School Center of Internet and Society, wrote in his blog: ‘There’s a simple solution to all this, one that might make a rational conversation about net neutrality possible. And that is to eliminate the distinction between common carriers and everyone else. Hold everyone to the same rules regardless of what information they are transporting–whether voice, video, television, data. Because regardless of who’s doing what, these days it’s all bits.'”

WSJ/Crovitz

“Information Age: Will The Internet Survive its 40th?” The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 1, 2009. R. Gordon Crovitz’s column on Net Neutrality quotes extensively from Larry and from “The Laws of Disruption.” “The mistake regulators and those who enable them continue to make is trying to micromanage individual technologies or applications,” Mr. Downes writes. “The bottom line is simple. Encouraging infrastructure is good; micromanaging it is bad.”