Google Takes a Lesson from Spider Man

As all fans of Spider-Man know, “With great power comes great responsibility.” In the midst of
headlines over Google’s battle with the Belgian court, the Publisher Relations folks at Google have come out with an official policy statement on how Google will exercise its great power over web content. As John Battelle commented, this was a very important statement by the most influential player in media today. He suggests that Google is trying to establish a framework for negotiating new business relationships with publishers, by clearly marking a line between the publisher’s assets and the search engine’s. Clearly, both Google and the publisher have much to gain from the pooling of these assets. However, the open question (and what should be the focus of negotiation) is how to share in the value created when Google indexes articles and surfaces headlines and snippets in search results. What rankles the European publishers especially is Google’s assumption of Fair Use rights before ever engaging in that negotiation. No doubt this is especially irritating to the Europeans, because this interpretation is based on US copyright law and practice, which is generally more liberal than international standards. Given the general antipathy within the European community toward other recent unilateral initiatives by Americans, it’s not hard to see why this might make European publishers uneasy.

In the context of everything else going on in the world these days, Google’s preemptory assumption of Fair Use rights risks the company being seen as just another example of American cowboy attitudes toward the rest of the world. However, by laying out a clear statement of policy on this issue, they are providing some much-needed transparency, and a potentially more friendly basis for business negotiations with publishers. Perhaps in so doing they will avoid the kind of mistakes recently made by another powerful American who ignored the lesson of Spider-Man.