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Google Books

As you may recall, the Google Book project began as book scanning for libraries:

We are thrilled to begin scanning book collections belonging to the University of Michigan, Harvard. Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library, so that they become more searchable.

We launched the first part of Google Print in October to make the world of books more discoverable. The thing is, most books in the world are out of print. By working with libraries as well as publishers, we'll have access to millions of books, including many unique volumes that haven't been read in years. Soon a new generation will be able to discover them too.

The trouble was, some publishers – well, most of them actually – didn't really like the idea of Google doing that, and took legal action to stop it. As a result, we ended up with the Google Book Settlement:

This agreement is truly groundbreaking in three ways. First, it will give readers digital access to millions of in-copyright books; second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell their works; and third, it will further the efforts of our library partners to preserve and maintain their collections while making books more accessible to students, readers and academic researchers.

Well, yes, but the setttlement did one other thing, too: it effectively guaranteed that Google would have a monopoly over digitised books, something recognised when it was recently struck down by the US courts as the result of another legal move.

The idea of digitising every book is a fantastic one; where Google went wrong was establishing a monopoly position for itself. This meant that those of us in favour of creating a digital commons of knowledge couldn't back Google's self-centred approach.

Had Google been fighting for the *general* principle that anyone could digitise books for the purpose of indexing, then it would have had far more support. The rejection of the previous settlement, and the new management at Google, therefore offers the opportunity to change tack, and to position the company as a defender of the fair use/fair dealing rights of everyone.

Patents

Google also has a golden opportunity to prove just how non-evil it is thanks to the following recent move:

The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation. Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new technology. The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits. It's for these reasons that Google has long argued in favor of real patent reform, which we believe will benefit users and the U.S. economy as a whole.

But as things stand today, one of a company’s best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services. Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories.

So after a lot of thought, we’ve decided to bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio in the company’s bankruptcy auction.

Google goes on to say:

If successful, we hope this portfolio will not only create a disincentive for others to sue Google, but also help us, our partners and the open source community—which is integrally involved in projects like Android and Chrome—continue to innovate.

In fact, I think Google could actually help the open source community a lot if it acquires these patents, but probably not in the way it is contemplating.

For example, it could offer royalty-free licences to any project using an open source licence. Or it might go much further, and offer to assert relevant patents it holds against any entity trying to attack an open source project with patents. That's potentially a huge commitment, but one that Google is unlikely ever to have to meet: patents are largely about bluff, and the mere threat of Google's legal action would almost certainly be enough to deter most companies from taking the chance (but not patent trolls, of course.)

That's by no means an exhaustive list of things that Google could do in this sphere. I'd be interested to hear what else you think we should be suggesting to Larry Page and his Google 2.0 crew as ways for his company to get back to being good by backing openness more.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca. For other feature articles by Glyn Moody, please see the archive.

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