Google's Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin Advocate the Books Settlement

Google held a press conference in New York, with CEO Eric Schmidt and cofounder Sergey Brin covering most of the big issues affecting the company right now, namely its cloud strategy with Chrome and Chrome OS and other aspects regarding its products but also broader subjects concerning the search giant and the market as whole. However, a great focus and the subject of a lot of debate was the controversial Google Books settlement.

Google Books has been a sore spot for the company lately and has been the center of a lot of mostly unwanted attention. The search giant is now working on a revised settlement with the publishers and authors, after the US Department of Justice expressed concerns about the settlement's current form, and a new version should be ready in November. The most controversial aspect of the deal was the right that Google would have to sell the so-called orphaned books for which a copyright owner can't be determined or found.

“Some of the criticisms are legitimate and can be addressed by changes in the settlement. Some other criticisms are by people who don’t want a change,” Mr. Schmidt said. “The scenario in front of us is not perfect. But the perfect is the enemy of the good.” While acknowledging that the settlement wasn't perfect, it was the best solution for the moment and challenged the critics, referring to the large companies like Amazon or Microsoft, to come up with a better plan to make all of these books available to the public.

“The companies that are making these objections have done nothing for orphan works,” Sergey Brin added. “Nobody was interested in these works at all, and there is no existing market for them. So I think these objections that Google will be the only one are pretty ludicrous given that no one else has done this.”

They emphasized that the overall goal was to make these books available to the users and to see that the authors got the proper compensation. Brin also expressed his concerns about the fact that the settlement was limited to the US and that it might be even harder in some places to make the books available to the users. He also believes that the current settlement in the US, while restricted to Google, would make it easier to get the proper legislation in place to handle these issues, especially the matter of orphaned books, which is the ultimate goal and would be a much better solution.