When I arrived, UO Law professor Ryan Vacca was giving an informative presentation on liability in Internet law. One of the most fundamental questions he answered, in my mind, was the liability of web hosts for the content of others.  I’ve always wondered what would happen if someone, in the form of a comment, appropriated content or wrote something libelous on my blog.

According to Vacca,  a blogger or message board host would most likely be protected in such a case under section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, which states that, ” No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”  From a strict liability perspective, Vacca said that the best way to deal with copyright claims on user content was not to to acknowledge them in writing, as doing so can potentially weaken protection.

The second panel featured a designer and administrator from PR and marketing firm Wagner Edstrom, who spoke about the different strategies their firm employed and advised graduating students on how to approach employers in the PR and marketing industry.  Also sitting on the second panel, was the sole journalist speaking at the event, Register Guard Entertainment Editor Senera Markstrom .  Markstorm paid a quirky homage to conventional media by breaking out a pink box labeled 1994 that contained a telephone and handwritten notes.  She also talked about integrating social media into her work at the Register Guard, which outside her, appears to have virtually no social media approach.

The keynote speaker at the panel was Lauren Gelman, Executive Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.  She spoke about the variety of the legal issues that continue to pop up as social media users post more and more personal information about themselves online.  In the Q and A session, I asked Gelman about her thoughts on the recent class-action settlement that Google negotiated on behalf of their digital book project.  Some, including myself, believe that if approved the settlement would give Google a monopoly on digital books.  When I asked Gelman if she thought fear of the plan was justified, she was brisk with her response, saying, “You should be terrified.”

All and all, it was a pretty solid event, but  I really would have liked to have seen more journalists speaking.  We know that P.R. gets the Internet–there are endless social media gurus out there to prove it–but there seems to be a dearth of voices on how journalism is effectively utilizing social media to combat its economic woes.  Although, that might be partly due to the fact that the future of journalism is a question that few people currently answer with much besides pessimism and abject nostalgia.

Read My Column on Google’s Book Project Here

The hearing, convened by Senator John Kerry, featured representatives from the Washington Post, the Dallas News and Google.  Kerry, who has expressed solidarity with  newspapers–especially the plight of the Boston Globe–led things off by welcoming attendees to “a brave new world” and quoting Joseph Pulitzer’s refrain, “Our republic and its press will rise and fall together.”

Maryland representative Ben Cardin (D) stumped for his recently proposed Newspaper Revitalization Bill, which would allow newspapers to receive 501 C-3 classification and the beefy tax breaks that accompany them(see past post on its flaws).

Former Washington Post Managing Editor Steve Coll struck a balanced tone by referring to the current state of journalism as “creative destruction.”  He complimented the innovation of online enterprise, but questioned if citizen journalists and bloggers could provide the same valuable public interest reporting as newspapers.

David Simon, a former journalist and producer of The Wire, was much more blunt.  He bashed blogging as “repetition, commentary and froth,” and content aggregation as leeching.  He laid much of the blame at the decision of newspapers to tie in with Wall-Street and “unencumbered capitalism”

However, his heated remarks were no match for Huffington.  In her thick Greek accent, the baroness of blog lacerated newspaper bosses for “putting content behind walled gardens,” “sticking their fingers in the dike” and “pretending the last 15 years didn’t happen.”

She stated her optimism that journalism would survive and flourish, but recommended that efforts be pulled away from saving newspapers and toward saving journalism.  She lauded the blogosphere for its ability to follow and hammer away at a story until it “breaks through the static,” and she excoriated the mainstream media for not doing its journalistic duty in covering the lead up to the Iraq War and the financial crisis. The news industry has had “far too many autopsies and not enough biopsies,” she said.

It was a rousing performance.  I didn’t agree with all it, but Huffington clearly has the spunk and tenacity necessary to transform a crisis into a period of innovation and growth.  Considering the pessimistic state of journalism, I’ll take it.

You can watch the video of the hearing here

- George Orwell

If you Google the word “Google,” you get 2,650,000,000 results. If you Google “Google, monopoly,” 3,210,000 items are returned. If you Google “Google, Orwellian nightmare, digital apocalypse, corporate intellectual engineering,” the harvest is much more limited; only 1,280 matches appear.

These results, the product of complicated algorithms, exist for one reason: Google allows them to. The moment it decides this information is either irrelevant or unsavory, it can easily be buried deep into the black hole of cyberspace where no one – not even an errant bottom-feeder – can find it.

By: Patrick Finney

Of course, the folks at Google don’t do this; it’s not their business plan. What they want, at the moment, is to acquire more information, not bury it. But imagine a future in which all information is stored, displayed, filtered and produced by one source: Google. Imagine a future in which print books cease to exist – it’s likely on the horizon – and every piece of literature from Plato’s “The Republic” to your calculus textbook exists in a digital format with one monolithic gatekeeper. Imagine typing in a search query for Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ and getting back a list of books about baking turkeys; the novel is gone, vanished.

Yes, I am being sensational. True, there is little evidence Google has such pernicious motives, but one part of this doomsday scenario is not only feasible, it’s happening now. A $125-million settlement of a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of the copyright holders of millions of books may provide Google exclusive digital rights to most of the books in the world.

The lawsuit is a result of Google’s Book Search Project, for which the company has scanned and digitized more than 7 million books in the last five years. Google has been digitizing and making available for download all books not under U.S. copyright law. It also scans and shows snippets – up to 20 percent – of copyrighted books, under the protection of the Fair Use doctrine. Google’s intention, according to its mission statement, is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” However, being able to publish snippets of books in search results also creates revenue, which is why a consortium of authors and publishers sued Google in 2005 demanding a share of the profits.

What happened next was a bit of legal maneuvering so sly it would have blown Perry Mason’s mind.

When Google sat down at the negotiating table with publishers, it was ready and willing to pony up a bundle of cash to keep its digital library growing. However, what it wanted in return was an explicit license to digitize and sell “orphan books,” which are out-of-print copyrighted works with no findable heir or owner. By some estimates, these books make up about 70 percent of books in print, and there’s no precedent for whom their digital rights should belong to.

By wresting control of orphan books into perpetuity, Google essentially turned the concept of a class-action lawsuit inside out. In addition, it inserted a “most favored nation” clause in the settlement, which would prevent publishers from offering better terms on non-orphan books to Google’s future competitors.

The ramifications are chilling. Brewster Kahle, founder of the non-profit Internet library Archive.org, said future libraries may be nothing more than “subscribers to a few monopoly corporations’ databases.” Even more worrisome will be Google’s ability to alter the availability and popularity of literature via its search rank. If Google doesn’t like a book, it will be able to effectively purge it by making it unsearchable. The cherry on top is that Google will have a comprehensive database of the reading lists of all Americans that will be searchable by any topic. Wow, I wonder who might be interested in that?

The only good news is that the settlement has yet to be approved, and a public comment period during which objections can be heard has just been extended. Consumer groups, publishers and even Microsoft have stated their opposition to the settlement. More importantly, it appears the Department of Justice is considering filing an anti-trust grievance against Google.

It should.

There has been much speculation on how the Obama administration would deal with Google – who tussled with the Bush DOJ on numerous occasions – as Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt was previously an informal technology advisor to the president. The administration needs to quell any speculation of favorable treatment by intervening now.

America’s most powerful corporation having a virtual monopoly on digital books isn’t just bad news; it’s cataclysmic. If anyone should be conscious of the awesome power of the world’s biggest search engine, it’s President Obama. His name returns 103 million results.

This article was printed in the Oregon Daily Emerald on May 4.  Props to Patrick Finny for the illustration.