Judge Chin to Google: Don't Be Evil

Judge Denny Chin

So I have been reading about Google's plan to scan all the books with (both with claimed and unclaimed copyright ownership) it can get its hands on in order to create a giant digital library.  This has been an on-going project dating back to 2004.

What's interesting to me here is what's going on around the actual project.

First of all, the mighty "Don't Be Evil" company, according to Judge Denny Chin, began scanning books into its digital library project without permission of the original authors (see this, page #4).

Now I would have thought that violating copyright law as something "evil".  After all, the author, publisher, and so forth all have an economic interest in published works - many make their living by writing.  So wouldn't taking away someone's livelihood be an act of "evil"?  After all Google does not own these books.

Then there is the "violation of the law" aspect.  Copyright law, for whatever you think its worth, has a well established place in society.  While that place has been pushed on pretty hard by the digital age non-the-less it still garners a certain amount of respect - accept, apparently, at Google.

Now Google has interesting ideas about all this.

According to this article, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google from 2001 until recently, seems to think that "evil" is a scalable concept and that sometimes doing small evils is okay if the larger result is for the "greater good".

No I find this whole discussion very interesting.

The "ends justify the means" is a form of Consequentialism (see this).  Consequentialism is a belief system where one accepts that only the results of one's actions are the basis for judging actions.

Here Google's claim is that a world wide digital library would be nice to have: people in remote areas would have access to books that would otherwise not be available to them, scholars access to inaccessible works, and so on.  I don't think anyone would disagree that it would be a "nice thing" to have.  But Google's notion here is obviously either very naive very insidious.

By this same argument one could assert that all companies software, placed into a giant library without their permission, would also be a good thing.  Certainly it would all everyone to access and review said software without the owner's permission. 

I wonder if Google would like their software placed into a publicly library for free searching and free excerpts?

The problem with consequentalism is that its simply a matter of convenient self-serving justification for the perpetrator of a crime.

I can argue that by breaking into Fort Knox and distributing all the gold to the poor society would be a better place.  And by measuring my actions by distributing billions of dollars to the poor I would in fact be a really great, stand up guy.  The only problem would be that I was breaking the law by commit any number of federal, state and local crimes.

Google further tried to perpetrate this crime by creating a faux "settlement" with groups claiming to represent various groups of authors.  Not all authors - but groups representing authors.

This is another "slight of hand" aspect to consequentialism being exploited by Google.  When you cannot directly jump to the "greater good" create a settlement with a group that ostensibly represent "everyone" - even though they don't - and then claim all is well.  This looks like everyone's issues are addressed when in fact the "group" is usually in a position to benefit from the "new" greater good - especially over those which it does not represent.

Fortunately Judge Denny Chin sees this Google grab to usurp copyright as exactly for what it is - which is why he is requiring that authors who do not want their works involved in Google's effort  to "opt out".

No doubt this creates a legal headache for Google, with its 12 million scanned books, because now it will have to clear copyright on each and every one.

Somehow I don't feel bad...