Интернет-кидалово: Как главные игроки сдерживают прогресс

Certifying such a broad class should be difficult -- not least because any defendant in such a case should be able to point out to the judge that 8,000 writers comprise a tiny minority of all book authors in the past and future of America.

But Google cannily did not object to the certification. After all, the AG would likely ask for a pricetag that Google could afford. And it's unlikely that future competitors of Google would be able to negotiate with such a class, even if they could afford to.

Once the Book Search settlement was announced, writers around the world were astounded to discover that an arrogant cabal of D.C. insiders presumed to strike a deal on their behalf. These writers are up in arms and won't ever let something like this happen again.

So the AG got a settlement out of Google -- or rather, Google got a settlement out of the AG. For a price that Google can handily afford, its business model is now definitively legal, and any competitors that try to move in on Google will be stuck playing by the system that Google devised, with Google itself elevated to most favored nation.

So rather than guaranteeing a future in which dozens of companies compete to see who could offer the best terms to writers, the Authors Guild just raised the cost of entering Google's book-search market to infinity.

Nice going, Authors Guild.

Stop Working for Gatekeepers

So, how do you use copyright to ensure that the future is more competitive and thus more favorable to creators and copyright industries?

It's pretty easy, really: Use your copyrights to lower the cost of entering the market instead of raising it.

What if the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had started out by offering MP3 licenses on fair terms to any wholesaler who wanted to open a retailer (online or offline), so that the cost of starting a Web music store was a known quantity, rather than a potentially limitless litigation quagmire?

What if the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the North American Broadcasters Association made their streams available to anyone who paid a portion of their advertising revenue (with a guaranteed minimum), allowing 10 million video-on-demand systems to spring up from every garage in the world?