The print/publishing world is waiting for the resolution (through settlements or trial) of the lawsuits pending against Google by publishers and authors accusing Google of violating U.S. Fair Use when they scanned and digitized copyrighted works for their Google Library program(see our report, “In Google We Trust?”). In the meantime, both Yahoo! and Microsoft have embarked on their own "digitization of everything" programs. Here's what's at stake. If the courts decide that it is legal for search engines to digitize copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission in order to show snippets of search results, that will remove one important right from the author's/copyright holder’s control: the right to determine what subsidiary rights to allow for their works. Once a work has been digitized and scanned without the author's/rights holder's permission, the horse is out of the proverbial barn. It's very difficult to control what uses are made of that digitized information.
Prediction #1: Google or any search engine/digitization service will pay a nominal amount for the right to digitize content and make it searchable. I believe that the amount paid will be miniscule. The digitization/scanning fee will probably be set, not by the author/rights holder but by a neutral third party, such as the Copyright Clearance Center in the United States. It needs to be a party that has the legal purview to set prices for intellectual property, which CCC does. The pricing can't be set by the publishers all getting together in a room. That would be a violation of antitrust law. It will probably be possible for authors/rights holders to waive the digitization/search license fee in order to ensure that their material is digitized and searchable. But, if so, it will be an explicit decision. It's also possible, nay, even probable, that the service providers who offer to digitize content will deduct the license fee from the costs of scanning/digitizing the content. Why does it matter? Because intellectual property owners need to have a say in whether or not they want their IP to become searchable, and they need to be able to control the rights about what happens as a result of that digitization/search.
Prediction #2: Consumers will be able to easily buy and use printed/published works by the page, chapter, or other logical unit (e.g., a recipe, a review). This activity is already underway at Amazon.com. You will be able to buy by the page and/or to upgrade your print purchase to print plus electronic. Last week, Random House suggested a price of four cents per page for fiction and trade books, to be split 50/50 with the author. Since the majority of books are approximately 200 pages long and sell at retail for $20 give or take in hardcover, that pricing makes sense. Think of it not as cannibalization of the revenues from the book, but as additional revenue. What you can DO with the published works is still in question. Will that license enable you to print the pages you purchase? Of course. Will it give you the rights to the electronic facsimile (e.g., PDF or eBook download)? Probably. Will it enable you to share the book with others electronically? Probably not. Will it let you print 1,000 copies? No.
Prediction #3: Business users will also be able to buy and use printed/published works by the page, chapter, article, or other logical unit. Again, this activity is already underway. Most of us—high-tech analyst firms, scientific journal publishers, etc.—sell our IP by the piece. What we don't have standards on yet is the pricing. My hunch is that the consumer pricing models will drive us towards a common set of consistent per-page pricing models, may be closer to $4/page than to four cents per page, given the perceived value and utility of the content to business people. But I believe that we will see standardization around pricing.
Prediction #4: Most high-value digital content will be licensed under institutional licenses. Most corporations, research libraries, universities, research labs, institutional investment firms, etc. will purchase enterprise licenses to collections of intellectual property as they do now. An employee of such a firm gains the rights to download, read, and use that material because he or she is covered under the rights agreements that have been made for the collections.
Prediction #5: There will be common collections of rights that are bundled together. Rights are tricky. Today, there are many, many subsidiary rights: The right to translate a work. The right to create derivatives of a work. The right to share the work with others for specific purposes. It's too difficult for customers to pick and choose among this minefield. But we're seeing a great deal of simplification. The Creative Commons Licenses offer good models of common rights bundles. We expect to see even more standardized models of rights that are easy for business people to understand and purchase, such as reprint rights, Web posting rights, translation rights, and so on.
Prediction #6: Print on Demand Will Continue to Take Off. Of course, we can already print from our computers. But that yields a lot of unwieldy pages to shuffle. Today, the ability to order print books on demand is a big business. Sales of books that are printed on demand have increased 50 percent each year for the last two years, according to Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes and Noble. “This is all new business to us as these books were either out of print before or are from self-published authors that could not economically bring their books to market due to the high costs of traditional publishing.”
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