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From the President's Desk
January 2010

Trotting into History with Google 2.0
(Horse Manure Included)
by Salley Shannon

Publishers are today's livery stable operators. They are destined to die out, or else morph into something else as the way words are carried evolves. We're now on the cusp of the Digital Age. Exactly a hundred years ago, in 1910, we were on the cusp of the Automotive Age.

If you lived in an American town of decent size in 1910, there were at least one and probably several livery stables, where people rented a horse and buggy or boarded their own horses. Livery stables were at the center of town life. You could count on finding one in walking distance of the local hotel and railroad depot.

These were useful, profitable businesses. There were steam locomotives, but in 1910, the major source of energy and transportation neighed and produced manure. In all of the United States, there were 14,225 cars, and Henry Ford had built 12,000 of them in that same year. His Model T "Flivvers" sold so fast, he didn't bother with advertising.

Twenty years later, in 1930, there were 48 million cars in the United States. Autos meant farm kids could go to high school in serious numbers, sparking an educational revolution, which in turn, sparked a social and economic one. The Model T also led directly to mass production, paved roads, and to the destruction of many solid businesses.

The flip side of progress isn't pretty. If you owned a livery service in 1910, by 1930, you likely had no business left. Same for just about everything associated with horses, from breeding to smithing to harness-making.

Play a game with me: Let's assume that in 1915, history took a little sideways jaunt. That year, seeing their businesses in freefall, the American Association of Livery Stables had lots of semi-hysterical members. AALS members banded together with the Horse Breeders Union in a class action suit against Henry Ford and the other car manufacturers for violating their patent on horses.

Let's pretend Ford settled the suit. Ford agreed to pay every horse breeder a dollar for each horse displaced. Then the livery stable guys thought of a way to carve themselves a piece of the action in perpetuity! Horse power and cars go together, right? Their settlement plan awarded them 27 percent of profits from any people-locomotion product invented in the future, plus 10 percent for expenses. To divide up the money, they cleverly devised an "Auto Rights Registry" to set auto prices based on complex formulas only they could understand, and rules that made it "illegal" for them to be sued.

Of course, this was terribly unfair to the folks who actually made the cars. It also was unfair to car buyers, because prices were artificial, that is, actually not based on their value as determined in the marketplace. But the livery service folks yelled "Public good! Remember the orphan horses" a lot, and eventually, a court approved their plan.

The Model T was quite threatening to livery service people, so their representatives on the registry board were never eager to license ideas for other sorts of vehicles. That's why, in 2010, we mostly drive the Model U now.

And of course, there aren't all that many cars around. Ford kept making less money per car, even though the registry set high prices. It just took the heart right out of him, and the other car producers, too. A lot of them got out of that line of work.

There's proverbial manure to shovel these days, but not much of the real stuff. But we still have livery stables every few blocks in all our towns, even though it's 2010.

Comes now the second version of the Google Book Search settlement, drafted by the G-masters of the Universe, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's sharp remarks deflated the first version. Then the Justice Department attorneys gave it 20 whacks and it whimpered off to Judge Denny Chin's chambers to die.

This new version is still the dog's dinner, but it has a nice tablecloth beneath it. The parties changed this and added that, clearly in the hope of convincing the Justice Department that settlement 2.0 does not violate anti-trust laws from every angle. Foreign authors have escaped Google's maw—lucky them! Except for authors living in England, Australia, and Canada, their books aren't included. That's to satisfy Germany, France, and the other European nations that howled. Orphan books, which were never all that important to the Authors Guild, the publishers, or Google in the first place, get handled somewhat better.

Writers keep asking me, "Why are we faced with this mess? Does it really matter all that much? How does any of this relate to Google's massive copyright violations?"

We are faced with this because the G-masters decided to crawl the world's books, vastly improving their search engines, and they have piles of money. Enough to risk the penalties of violating copyright law ten million times, or however many books they've swiped by now; they keep scanning. In setting up the monopolistic Book Rights Registry—still with us, few changes—the Authors Guild gets enormous influence. The publishers, who are terrified because they see little role for themselves in many future self-publishing and digital publishing scenarios, see a way to lock print royalty splits in amber, so they can get the same profits for e-books, although the costs of producing those are much lower.

It matters, chickadees, because this is an attempt to strip away your rights in the guise of helping you. It could cost you major money. Meanwhile, writers are being bombarded with relentless half-truths and happy talk.

Even the frequent comparison to ASCAP in the music industry is so misleading that it's virtually a lie. ASCAP started small. It was always an opt in—if you thought it would serve your interests, you joined. All musicians were not co-oped by an "opt out" mechanism in one fell swoop, forcing them into ASCAP whether they liked it or not. To this day, ASCAP serves only perhaps 50 percent of musicians. And it has been sued twice by the Justice Department for price-fixing violations, and operates under court supervision.

How does either settlement version relate to Google's illegal scanning? It doesn't. Period. That's one of the huge problems that may, if we're lucky and our lawyers are skilled, get this festering manure thrown on the garbage heap of history.

ASJA president Salley Shannon had a great-uncle who ran a small livery stable. He sold his horses and learned how to fix cars.