Drummond Talks Google Settlement at AAP Meeting
by Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 3/10/2009 3:39:00 PM
When the authors and publishers filed their lawsuits against Google more than three years ago, “not in my wildest dreams did I think we’d end up where we did,” said Google senior v-p for corporate development & chief legal officer David Drummond, who was invited to talk about the settlement between the parties at Wednesday’s AAP annual meeting. Drummond said Google resisted the idea of “pushing a legal point to a conclusion,” and rather than see fair use vindicated in court, decided it was more important to take advantage of the opportunity to find an agreement that could benefit the world. According to Drummond, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had always thought it would be necessary to scan books if the search engine they were creating was to be truly world class, and said that the agreement moves Google toward that goal quickly.
It was clear from Drummond’s remarks, and from questions posed by Bertelsmann’s Richard Sarnoff who interviewed Drummond, that there are still lots of questions about what the Google settlement means for the future of publishing. Neither man was willing to predict what the size of the institutional market for the database of digital books that Google will create once the settlement is approved by the judge, although Drummond said he believes it will be “substantial” by 2015. The secret to achieving success in the consumer market will be to “figure out what consumers like best” and then deliver that product, Drummond said. He explained that while Google has generally been reluctant to sell content, it realized that at some point it would have to and the sale of digitized books is an example of that. He said Google fully intends to actively sell and promote whatever products are created following the judge’s approval of the agreement. He addressed what is likely to be one of the post-settlement’s thorniest issues--how to account for the millions of pieces of information that will exist, and be sold; Drummond noted that Google has lots of experience processing millions of transactions and is used to the scale that will be necessary to handle the digital database. (The question of when the Book Rights Registry might be launched did not come up. Parties say they expect to announce an executive director “soon.”)
One issue that had been largely overlooked in the discussion following the announcement of the deal is what happens to new books published after January 5, 2009, the cutoff date for books to automatically become part of Google Book Search. New books released after that date are not part of the agreement and Drummound and Sarnoff both said they would like to find a way to seamlessly work those new books into the databases.
The settlement covers U.S. publishers only, but Drummond said Google is eager to reach deals with publishers worldwide. He noted Google has held a couple of “road shows” in Europe to explain the settlement to publishers there and that those efforts will continue; indeed Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken left the meeting early to catch a plane to Europe where he was going to held “evangelize” about the settlement.
Immediately following the Sarnoff-Drummond discussion, a brief demonstration of the Google settlement Web site was conducted by Tore Hodne, of the Rust Consulting firm who is senior project administrator.
