14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made some comments recently at Wired's Disruptive by Design conference about Google's settlement with book authors and publishing companies, which gave the company exclusive rights to sell digital copies of out-of-print books even without the copyright holder's expressed approval. As expected, the online retailer's CEO wasn't thrilled about the deal though he didn't go into too many details about what exactly his company disagreed with. The search giant's Dan Clancy has since responded to some of the comments in a post on the Google Public Policy blog.
"We have strong opinions about that issue which I'm not going to share," Bezos stated when asked to comment on the Google settlement. "But, clearly, that settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited and it is being revisited."
Under the deal Google would be the exclusive provider of digital copies of books unclaimed by authors leaving Amazon, the world’s biggest book retailer, out in the cold without the possibility to sell those same books. "There are many forces of work looking at that and saying it doesn't seem right that you should do something, kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights," Bezos said.
Google on the other hand says that its only goal is to provide easy, open access to books for every user on any platform and believes that the system it has put in place will provide an easy way for other parties to find the copyright holders and license their work, which was previously much harder to do.
"We believe more choice is good. That's exactly why our vision for Google Books is to create an open platform that, among other things, allows any bookstore, library, publisher partner or individual website developer to provide their users with the ability to search across and preview books in a similar way to Amazon's Search Inside! Feature," Clancy wrote in the post. "In the end, we believe more access is good for everyone, Google and Amazon alike. But most importantly, it's good for readers who simply want to find and enjoy books, and for authors and publishers who want to create and sell works."