Comments on: Google’s Settlement with Publishers: Looking Down the Road

By: Google Settlement: Implications for Publishers White Paper | Kellblog

Google Settlement: Implications for Publishers White Paper | Kellblog — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:36:49 +0000

[...] Rosenblatt has blogged about the white paper and about the settlement itself on his Copyright and Technology [...]

By: Bill Rosenblatt

Bill Rosenblatt — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:52:17 +0000

Actually, there’s nothing that says that Google has to do the work. The beauty of the arrangement, as I said, is that if Google won’t do it, someone else can. Publishers can structure content themselves, or service providers can do it for them as part of an online content service they are offering, and the BRR can track usage.

Lawyers for publishers involved in the Google settlement are not business development or product management people; they aren’t going to weigh the costs and benefits of adopting certain business models. An ROI calculation was not a prerequisite to listing a particular business model in the settlement agreement. The future business models enumerated there are aspirational and non-binding.

Both sides have to decide if it’s worth the investment to create structured content with standard metadata. This is something that publishers have wrestled with for years, so it’s not a new problem to them. I just question whether Google — which pulls in orders of magnitude more revenue than most publishers — would consider the opportunities big enough to bother with.

By: Matthias

Matthias — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:32:44 +0000

Bill,
interesting analysis of this complex issue. Why do you think that the lawyers didn’t think the issue through – because the BRR can do business with everyone else and Google has to do the work (the structuring)?

By: Immateriblog.de - Matthias Spielkamp über Immaterialgüter in der digitalen Welt

Immateriblog.de - Matthias Spielkamp über Immaterialgüter in der digitalen Welt — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:05:06 +0000

[...] Bill Rosenblatt, einer der besten Auskenner auf dem Gebiet des Digital Rights Management, einen Ausblick auf die Geschäftsmodelle, die mittels Googles Digitalisierunsstrategie möglich werden – und auch, wie Google sich durch [...]

By: Bill Rosenblatt

Bill Rosenblatt — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:36:25 +0000

Peter, thanks for writing.

Of course Google has to OCR the text in order to index it. And they can intuit basic structural information such as paragraphs, chapter headings and so on, which could be used to create basic XML tags. But Google would need involvement from publishers to be able to tag logical structure beyond that – for example, to identify index terms that could be combined with terms from material from other publishers to be used in custom publications for the higher ed market. I’m questioning whether Google would want to be bothered with what is ultimately a series of niche opportunities.

By: peter brantley

peter brantley — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:58:35 +0000

strictly speaking, libraries are not providing text; they provide books, which google digitizes. (libraries also provide some metadata, which is combined by google with other metadata, some of which they license). google OCRs the images, and of course could generate all manner of XML data from that, including structural information. in fact, they already do this.

what publishers might provide for 2009+ books is another topic all together; there are many issues relating to whether the BRR might cover future works as well as those under the settlement.

By: Suzanne Axtell

Suzanne Axtell — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:16:19 +0000

Thanks for the preview of your TOC panel presentation (and for the kind words about the conference)–sounds like it’s going to be a useful and illuminating discussion.