On Amazon’s Kindle 2 there is a 'read-aloud', text-to-speech function.  It’s not a huge step from a parent buying a book to read to child. But the Author’s Guild didn’t see it see it like that; “they don’t have the right to read a book out loud” said executive director Paul Aiken in response.

This quote, though comical, helps to demonstrate some of our messy copyright problems.

Amongst the debate over Google's online book service – which is over the settlement between Google, who are digitizing a huge portion of the world's books, and the Association of American Publishers and the Authors’ Guild’s who want to make sure they get their slice of the action - it has been interesting to spot the various shades of disagreement and tangled contradictions. It's not a simple fight between ‘copyright meanies’ and ‘open knowledge heroes’. Those two teams have weighed in, but oddly, some of those fighting for that culture of openness of information and knowledge have been criticising Google's position. In the past Google have been celebrated as unlocking the doors to the world's knowledge.  Not so any more; could the virtual poacher be turning gamekeeper?

The image of Internet start-ups being the unproblematic 'good' guys - the friendly start ups fighting the information hoarders and sticking it to the analog Man - has long gone (Google's now very contested 'Don't Be Evil' is a great example of this change). The Internet has been going through its very own gentrification process, developing from a Wild West frontier to a more mainstream 'public space'. As the new business have matured and become prominent, powerful organisations in their own right, their practices, once seen as significant but harmless or in the public interest, are now being reconciled with our existing legal systems.

One of the most prominent campaigns in the US against the Google deal is the Open Book Alliance. There is a great summary of the debate by James Boyle at the FT this week. He is concerned that the deals struck by Google will unfairly privilege the search engine’s own book provision and put freedom of choice, competition and diversity of provision at risk.

The online copyright debate exposes a fascinating collision of interests - the rights-holders aiming for a better copyright deal, the businesses making money from new ways of distributing (often other people's) information and the advocates of open knowledge to name just a few. Copyright law is supposed to help us balance private and public interests with respect to cultural goods like books and music. And these kind of disputes help to show its not really doing its job anymore.

One of the most powerful points in Will Davies' forthcoming Demos pamphlet, Reinventing the Firm, is just how problematic the idea of 'ownership' is in the context of intangible goods like information. We don’t own the rights to a book, but we have an investment in it being widely available. These are cultural as well as economic goods. However, gaining some traction on the public's investment in goods or organisations or services with a social value is really important and an increasingly significant challenge. Our copyright laws don’t do a great job of setting out how books and music and film contribute social and public benefits as well as possible financial rewards to creators. And that helps to explain why it’s hard to know where to stand when companies like Google mix private interest with delivering what might be socially valuable. It’s hard to create an environment for organisations that have private business interests in making available or exploiting these public goods. 

The demands of those such as the Open Book Alliance that, as the new big players such as Google strike deals to legitimize their services, the principles of openness and access are maintained. They think that the settlement gives Google a new monopoly over book rights. It's complicated stuff, but there's a good summary of their position by the Open Books Alliance here. At heart, it seems that because copyright law doesn't do the job of specifying how digital book services could work in general, the deal comes through a law suit specifically between Google and authors. These are new struggles for the old principles of making knowledge and information more widely available. And they help to explain why even a company undertaking the digitization of a huge chunk of the worlds libraries – to make it available in fantastic new ways - can come under fire for setting up new barriers to the openness of knowledge.

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