A Google Search of a Distinctly Retro Kind
Published: March 3, 2009
Last month an e-mail message washed up at the offices of The Cook Islands News in the South Pacific. It was a request to place a half-page advertisement in the newspaper, which has a circulation of 2,500. The cost was $370.
Skip to next paragraph 
To comply with a class-action suit by copyright holders affected by Google’s plan to offer all of literature online, old-fashioned legal notices in 70 languages are being placed in newspapers worldwide.
“We were amazed — it came from out of nowhere,” the newspaper’s editor, John Woods, said in a telephone interview. “We are very skeptical of ads like that.”
Even more surprising was who was paying for it: Google.
Google, the online giant, had been sued in federal court by a large group of authors and publishers who claimed that its plan to scan all the books in the world violated their copyrights.
As part of the class-action settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages; copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning, and can opt out of the whole system if they wish.
But first they must be found.
Since the copyright holders can be anywhere and not necessarily online — given how many books are old or out of print — it became obvious that what was needed was a huge push in that relic of the pre-Internet age: print.
So while there is a large direct-mail effort, a dedicated Web site about the settlement in 36 languages (googlebooksettlement.com/r/home) and an online strategy of the kind you would expect from Google, the bulk of the legal notice spending — about $7 million of a total of $8 million — is going to newspapers, magazines, even poetry journals, with at least one ad in each country. These efforts make this among the largest print legal-notice campaigns in history.
That Google is in the position of paying for so many print ads “is hilarious — it is the ultimate irony,” said Robert Klonoff, dean of Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., and the author of a recent law review article titled “Making Class Actions Work: The Untapped Potential of the Internet.”
So far, more than 200 advertisements have run in more than 70 languages: in highbrow periodicals like The New York Review of Books and The Poetry Review in Britain; in general-interest publications like Parade and USA Today; in obscure foreign trade journals like China Copyright and Svensk Bokhandel; and in newspapers in places like Fiji, Greenland, the Falkland Islands, and the Micronesian island of Niue (the name is roughly translated as Behold the Coconut!), which has one newspaper.
The almost comically sweeping attempt to reach the world’s entire literate population is a reflection of the ambitions of the Google Book Search project, in which the company hopes to digitize every book — famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth — found in the world’s libraries.
Under the proposed settlement, reached on Oct. 28 and still subject to court approval, there must be an effort the court finds “reasonable and practicable” to find authors and publishers — especially copyright holders of so-called orphan books, which are still in copyright but long out of print. So the task means placing at least one advertisement in every country in the world.
One reason courts have required such heroic efforts to reach the people covered by a settlement is that unless parties opt out of the settlement, they are automatically opting in. The least that must be done, the argument goes, is let those affected know about it.
But as it turns out, authors and publishers are hard to track down. More than members of most settlement classes, said Kathy Kinsella of Kinsella Media in Washington, which is directing the ad campaign, these are a particularly diffuse group.
“We looked at how many books were published in various areas,” she said, “and we knew from the plaintiffs and Google that 30 percent were published in the U.S., 30 percent in industrialized countries. The rest of the world is the rest.”
“We had some choices,” she added. “We thought it made sense that in order to meet the due-process standard that we were as broad-based as possible.”
So, using United Nations data, her company created a list of countries and territories. Some nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, were excluded because they do not agree to international copyright terms. In others, like Cuba, North Korea and Myanmar, her company is prohibited from buying ads because of United States trade embargos, Ms. Kinsella said.
Kinsella Media also hired a company to run the telephone line that takes calls, which, Ms. Kinsella said, raised its own questions: “How do you handle calls in 80-some languages around the world? How do you staff that? Is it worth having someone in French all the time?”
Michael Boni, a lawyer representing the Authors Guild, one of the parties that sued Google, acknowledged there was an aspect of “belts and suspenders” in using print and the Internet to spread the word about the settlement, but he added that “the Internet is not used to the same extent outside the U.S.”
“I have been doing class-actions for over 20 years, and I don’t think there is a notice program as comprehensive as this notice program,” he said.
For centuries, legal notices have been a reliable source of income for newspapers and, more recently, trade publications and television. Class-action notifications constitute a significant chunk of this revenue, with an estimated $50 million to $75 million spent a year, the bulk going to print advertising, according to Todd B. Hilsee, a communications expert in Philadelphia who advises courts on the issue.
Fran Biggs, the office manager at the weekly Penguin News in the Falkland Islands, said she was surprised by the Google settlement ad in her paper: “I suppose it did seem a bit odd, but if people are paying for it, why not?” She added that the advertising climate there is not as dire as it is in the rest of the world. “We never have any problems filling up pages,” she said. “We have a bunch of big stores.”
At The Cook Islands News, the advertisement led to a follow-up article the next week that quoted a prominent resident author, Ron Crocombe, who praised the convenience of the currently available Google Book Search (books.google.com), which publishes excerpts and tables of contents. He said it was useful “especially for us in small places like Rarotonga, where there are no big libraries or big bookshops.”
It turns out, however, that in the Google matter, the advertising side of the newspaper bent its rule of insisting on payment in advance. That led to a few nervous moments when the paper had not received its money. By the week’s end, however, the editor, Mr. Woods, reported that he had received a credit card authorization.
