Settlement as Barrier to Entry Angle
Check out Search Marketing and Musings' post on the GoogleBooks Settlement-as-Barrier-to-Entry-Angle and other thoughtful reflections on the excellent recent New Yorker article on "Google's Moon Shot," i.e., google's project to create a database of all books ever printed that are still in existence.
The paradigms they are a'changin' . . .
It's not your father's copyright law anymore . . . .
To get some sense of the upcoming legal battle and commercial strategizing, see the Online Wall Street Journal article in late '05 on Harper Collins' plans to digitize its own books here and Stanford Professor Larry Lessig's deeper legal thoughts here.
We love google. We can't help ourselves. We're temporarily trusting that it will "do no evil" just because we can't wait to see what they do next.
We have no idea what in the world is depicted in the image accompanying this post. We just liked the way it looked with Google's Moon Shot.
Thanks for the link!
Whereas much of Google's dominance is based on habit (eg one could envision an upstart capturing hearts and keyboards away from G by better technology or marketing, similar to what G did to Y and AV over the last 8 years), some parts of Google's power rests on more permanent legal & technical structures -- fiber & bandwidth contracts, patents, IP settlements, etc.
That's why I think the G books possible settlement described in the New Yorker piece could be really important -- we might look back on this in a few years and note the settlement (if and when it occurs) was a real fundamental lock-in 'brick' in the Google foundation...
Cheers!
Alan