Memorandum submitted by Google
Further to the invitation of the Committee to
give oral evidence to the Inquiry on New Media and the Creative
Industries, Google would like to provide the following written
evidence.
1. ABOUT GOOGLE
1.1 Google is a public and profitable company
focused on search services. We also serve corporate clients, content
publishers and site managers with cost-effective advertising and
a wide range of revenue generating search services.
1.2 Google is the world's most popular search
engine. We help people find, organize, create and communicate
information. We employ some 8,000 full-time employees worldwide,
including approximately 2,000 within Europe, Africa and the Middle
East.
2. THE IMPACT
UPON CREATIVE
INDUSTRIES OF
RECENT AND
FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
IN DIGITAL
CONVERGENCE AND
MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
2.1 The exponential growth of online activity
and digital convergence has created new markets, with new opportunities
for both consumers and businesses.
2.2 The key impact is to provide new platforms
for the creative industries to distribute their content to a wide
audience and seek new revenue streams. This brings with it the
key challenge to respect the responsibilities of individual consumers
and content providers operating in these new markets, not least
in supporting intellectual property rights.
2.3 Individual consumers are using the opportunities
the internet brings to express themselves—to create and
communicate, to organize and influence, to speak and be heard.
Go to Google Video or YouTube and you'll see that the communities
using these services view themselves not as passive recipients
of broadcast content but active participants in the creative process.
Trying either to control user preferences or to curtail their
choice is doomed to failure. Why—because people want control
over their media, rather than to be controlled by it.
2.4 Less obvious is the way in which the
net has created valuable new opportunities for established players
in the creative industries. The reality is that the internet's
rising tide is lifting business across the board. Take the music
industry for example:
— Apple's iTunes store didn't
exist four years ago. Today it has sold more than a billion songs
online.
— Or David Hasselhoff who made
his video—Jump in My Car—available on Google
Video well before it went on sale. This generated over six million
play backs, masses of user interest and catapulted the song straight
to number three in the UK charts.
2.5 Earlier this month four major media
companies—CBS, SonyBMG, Vivendi Universal and Warner—signed
deals with either Google or YouTube. All see the enormous potential
the internet offers.
— There are now one billion
people online—by far the biggest market the world has
ever known.
— It is the cheapest and most
flexible distribution platform available—its simple
protocols and open standards enable people to communicate anytime,
anywhere, anyhow.
— The internet has spawned the
most targeted and measurable form of advertising we've
seen to date.
2.6 Most important of all, the internet
has made it possible for content owners to interact with users,
harnessing their talents, ingenuity and enthusiasm, in ways that
were unimaginable just 10 years ago.
— This summer, for example, NBC—makers
of the American television series The Office—ran
a competition on YouTube where fans made their own promo for the
hit TV show.
— And we've seen singers—like
Teddy Geiger—and bands—like Cartel—interacting
directly with online communities to drive interest in their music.
2.7 The trend is clear—instead of
viewing user creativity as illegal activity, many media companies
now see it as an opportunity to raise awareness of their content.
The internet is not a zero sum game
2.8 The internet is not a zero sum game—it's
not "either-or", but "and". Media companies
can, for example, create their own destination sites and
work with search engines to help people find their content. Just
as retailers use the internet to market their products (one study
suggested that around 60% of customers research their purchase
online before going to a shop to buy it), broadcasters can stream
videos online and use interest in these clips to promote
their shows on TV.
2.9 In the digital world one person's success
doesn't necessarily come at another's expense. Google's growth
is a great example of this fact. We have hundreds of thousands
of online publishing partners whose income—along with 40%
of our own—derives from the advertising we place on their
websites.
2.10 Google does best when our partners
do well. And that's because we don't actually create or own content.
We are a technology company in the search and advertising businesses.
2.11 At Google we help users find, create
and communicate information and enable people—individuals
or companies—to make money from their online content through
targeted advertising.
3. THE EFFECTS
UPON THE
VARIOUS CREATIVE
INDUSTRIES OF
UNAUTHORISED REPRODUCTION
AND DISSEMINATION
OF CREATIVE
CONTENT, PARTICULARLY
USING NEW
TECHNOLOGY; AND
WHAT STEPS
CAN OR
SHOULD BE
TAKEN—USING
NEW TECHNOLOGY,
STATUTORY PROTECTION
OR OTHER
MEANS—TO
PROTECT CREATORS
3.1 The rules of production and dissemination
of creative content have been rewritten and new opportunities
now exist to create and communicate. Now anyone can record songs
and upload online; shoot home movies, edit, add special effects
and broadcast to millions worldwide; or write a blog, sharing
opinions and comments with readers in different countries and
on different continents.
3.2 The Internet has broken down many of
the barriers that exist between people and information—effectively
democratising access to human knowledge. By typing just a few
keywords into a computer you can learn about almost any subject.
Google is one of many organisations that work to make this possible.
3.3 But today only a fraction of the world's
information is available online. Google's corporate mission is
to help organise the world's information and make it universally
accessible and useful, which means making available a lot of information—newspaper
articles (many written over a century ago), books (of which there
are millions), images, videos (including all of the new footage
users are creating), websites, important financial information
and much, much more.
3.4 Millions of people use Google's web
search engine every day but few realise that it is the balance
of copyright law that enables it to exist.
4. WHERE THE
BALANCE SHOULD
LIE BETWEEN
THE RIGHTS
OF CREATORS
AND THE
EXPECTATIONS OF
CONSUMERS
4.1 Google's approach to content is based
on three key principles. First, we respect copyright. Second,
we let owners choose whether we include their content in our products.
Third, we work to bring benefit back to content owners
by partnering with them.
Respect copyright
4.2 There are many legal rights that help
protect content. Among the most important is copyright, which
ensures that content creators are rewarded for their creative
endeavors. It also helps foster future creativity.
4.3 Those laws—while protecting rights'
owners—also encourage others to make use of content in limited
ways. That is why newspapers are allowed to include short quotations
from in-copyright books in their reviews. That is also why search
engines can show snippets (small excerpts) of text in their results.
Copyright owners benefit from these types of usage because they
help to publicize their works.
4.4 Google News is a good example of how
Google protects copyright in practice. We index the content of
thousands of news sources online. When a user enters a query into
Google News, the search results show only headlines and snippets
from the relevant news articles. If users want to read the story,
they must click through links in our results to the original website.
4.5 Google Book Search is another example.
We are digitizing and indexing millions of books as part of our
effort to make these works as easily found as web sites are today.
Some of these books are in the public domain. For those, we will
show users the books' full text. Others books are in copyright.
For these we show only bibliographic information and a few snippets
of text, unless we have the owners' prior permission to display
more.
Let owners choose
4.6 We respect the wishes of content owners—even
if use of their work would be perfectly legal. For example if
a content owner asks us to remove his or her content from our
web search results, we do. If a newspaper does not want to be
part of Google News, we take the paper's stories out. And if publishers
would prefer not to have their books included in Google Book Search,
we honor their requests. It's simple: we always allow content
owners to opt out—quickly and easily.
4.7 Of course some people argue that we
should be asking content owners to opt-in, not requiring them
to opt-out. Google aims to provide comprehensive search results.
This would be impossible in a world where permission simply to
index (which is entirely legal) was necessary. But we also believe
that opt-out rather than opt-in benefits not just Google and users,
but also content owners.
4.8 If content isn't indexed it can't be
searched. And if it can't be searched, how can it be found? Imagine
a library with no index of titles or subjects of the books on
its shelves, or no catalogue of the authors who wrote them.
Benefit content owners
4.9 We partner with publishers, news organizations
and others to help them to reach a wider global audience. By enabling
users to discover information, Google drives web traffic, customer
queries, advertising revenues and sales to our partners—both
online and offline.
5. CONCLUSION
5.1 Protecting content owners' rights, respecting
their wishes, helping to reward them for their creative endeavors—these
are the primary principles that guide Google's approach. We believe
it's the best way to make the world's information universally
accessible and useful.
5.2 The great paradox of the digital world
is that as more and more useful information comes online (today
only around 15% of the world's data is digitized), it will be
harder for people to find what they want. Online content and web
search engines exist—in fact, can only exist—as symbiotic
partners, both of whom profit as technology enables more users
to find the information they're looking for.
25 October 2006
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