Digital Media

The death of Michael Jackson in June launched a frenzy of Web activity and propelled the late pop star to the top of the search charts for 2009.

That's the word from Google, Yahoo, and Bing, all of which have revealed their popular search terms for the past year.

It's not too shocking to see Jackson leading the searches for the year. Following the pop star's death in June, Akamai found that worldwide Web traffic had surged 11 percent over normal levels. Even Google--which in the initial going thought the Jackson-related traffic was an attack of some sort--was briefly sent staggering.

Searches for Michael Jackson songs spiked in late June when news broke about the pop star's death.

(Credit: Google)

According to Google's Zeitgeist findings, "Michael Jackson" was the "fastest rising" worldwide search term of 2009. In the U.S., "Michael Jackson" placed second behind "Twitter." Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, in a blog post also pointed to an up-and-coming music sensation:

As millions of fans said goodbye to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson led the list of our top 10 fastest rising queries across the globe. And a new star was born, too--quirky pop singer Lady Gaga became a search sensation the world over. In addition to appearing on many regional fastest-rising search term lists, from the Czech Republic to Switzerland and Kenya to the United Kingdom, Lady Gaga also landed in the #9 spot on the global fastest rising list.

On the social side, Google monitored whose Twitter accounts were the most searched for. According to the company, Miley Cyrus' Twitter account was the most sought after, followed by those of Lance Armstrong and Taylor Swift. Khloe Kardashian's marriage to basketball player Lamar Odom was the most-Googled wedding of the year.

"Michael Jackson" was the top Yahoo search term for the year. He was followed by a who's who (and a what's what) of the U.S. entertainment scene. "Twilight" was the second most-popular search term, followed by wrestling organization "WWE," starlet "Megan Fox," singer "Britney Spears," and manga series "Naruto." Filling out the top 10 were "American Idol," "Kim Kardashian," "Nascar," and "Runescape."

Microsoft's Bing, which debuted in late May, had similar results. Once again, "Michael Jackson" was the top "trending topic," followed by "Twitter" and "swine flu." "Stock market" and "Farrah Fawcett" rounded out Bing's top five.

Of course, 2009 was also marked by continued concern over the state of the economy. According to Yahoo, "coupons," "unemployment," and "stimulus plan" were the most-numerous queries related to the economy. By contrast, Google's most-searched economy-related terms were "crisis," "cash for clunkers," and "Iceland."

Google also followed queries related to celebrity deaths in 2009. Users searched for "Michael Jackson" the most, followed by "Billy Mays" and "Steve McNair." Yahoo's data revealed that Michael Jackson's death was the most-searched term, but unlike Google's data, the pop star was followed by "Farrah Fawcett" and "Patrick Swayze."

See also:
• Google Zeitgeist 2009
• Yahoo Year in Review 2009
• Top Bing searches in 2009

YouTube, which is already trying out the movie rental business, wants to get into TV, too.

Google's video site has been trying to convince the TV industry to let it stream individual shows for a fee, multiple sources tell me.

YouTube already lets users watch a smattering of TV shows for free, with advertising. Now it envisions something similar to what Apple and Amazon already offer: First-run shows, without commercials, for $1.99 an episode, available the day after they air on broadcast or cable.

Sources say the site's negotiations with the networks and studios that own the shows are preliminary. But both sides seem optimistic, since models for such deals already exist. No comment from YouTube.

The biggest stumbling block may be consumers. That's because Google is talking about streaming the shows, instead of letting consumers download them to their computers, as both Apple and Amazon do. But the networks and studios, who control pricing, will want to sell the streamed shows at the same price as downloads--they fear that offering them at a different price will force them to go back and rework their existing deals.

Executives at YouTube and TV insist that the disparity is simply a perception problem, and cite studies that show that most people who download TV episodes only watch them once, anyway. But that's a tough sell.

It's also possible that YouTube may skirt the issue by launching a TV rental business without the big hits that Apple and Amazon offer. One possibility: It could start by moving immediately to long and mid-"tail" shows and videos that aren't available other places, and don't have to match existing prices.

No matter how it does it, YouTube is likely to be just one of several outlets trying to get consumers to pay for TV on the Web in 2010.

Among others: In addition to its a la carte offering, Apple is trying to create a monthly subscription service. Hulu, the free TV site co-owned by News Corp.'s Fox, GE's NBC Universal and Disney's ABC, is expected to launch a subscription service of its own. And cable operators like Comcast will be launching different versions of "TV Everywhere" services, which give subscribers expanded access to online shows.

TV executives are generally enthusiastic about all of the above, since they are meant to create additional revenue streams without threatening the industry's existing business. That is: They're supposed to protect it from the digital disruption that has ravaged music, newspapers, etc.

But while Web users have an insatiable appetite for video, they've yet to demonstrate much interest in paying for it. If any of this is going to work, that will have to change.

Story Copyright (c) 2009 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.

Google wants to know more about how TiVo owners are exposed to commercials.

(Credit: TiVo)

Google and TiVo know you accidentally watch a few ads while fast-forwarding through the commercial breaks of your recorded programs, and they'd like a little more data to back that up.

Google plans to add TiVo "television viewing data" to its existing Google TV Ads program, the two companies said in a press release Tuesday. Google TV Ads is the company's attempt to re-create its AdWords and AdSense model on the small screen through a partnership with Dish Network, and it wants to use TiVo data to help its advertising clients measure how and when their ads are viewed.

DVRs like TiVo are not the favorite tech product of the television advertising business, as they allow viewers to watch shows whenever they like and skip the commercials. But most DVR owners (except for a few masters of the remote control) catch glimpses of ads as they whiz by, or overshoot the end of the commercial period and hit the 30-second rewind button, exposing them to the last ad shown before the program resumes.

That kind of viewing shouldn't count as a full ad impression, since the advertiser knows the viewer didn't watch the full ad, but Google seems to feel that it can't be completely ignored, either. It plans to use "anonymous second-by-second DVR viewing data" to track how viewers see ads placed through Google TV Ads. It also gives Google more access to viewer behavior on sources outside of Dish Network, including cable, satellite, and over-the-air viewers.

That could presumably make Google TV Ads more attractive to potential advertisers, since Google will be able to assemble a wealth of data on the viewing habits of DVR owners. Google also has a deal with Nielsen for viewing data, although some feel the new TiVo partnership will put a lot of strain on that relationship.

In a somewhat related move, TiVo has also partnered with MillerCoors to expose football fans to Coors Light ads when they are fast-forwarding through recorded NFL games.

Google has entered into an agreement to acquire online ad-optimization firm Teracent, the search giant announced in a blog post on Monday. The transaction is subject to several closing conditions, but is expected to close by the end of the quarter.

Google said it has been "busy releasing new features and products to help improve display advertising on the Web," according to the blog post. After examining Teracent's technology, the company felt that it fit "neatly" into its display-advertising goals, the blog said.

Teracent certainly brings something new to Google's advertising efforts. The company's technology tweaks images, products, messages, or colors to optimize ad units based on the viewer's location, what language they speak, the kind of content they're viewing, the local time, and how well particular units have performed in the past. It does all that work in real time as the algorithm examines the ad's environment.

"This technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns," Google wrote in a blog post. "In turn, this enables publishers to make more money from their ad space and delivers Web users better ads and more ad-funded web content."

Teracent should be integrated into Google's advertising efforts by the end of the quarter. Neither company divulged how much Teracent was acquired for.

Maybe Rupert Murdoch was serious about wanting to go without Google.

Murdoch's News Corp. has initiated discussions with Microsoft over a plan to have the media company's Web content essentially delisted from the world's largest search engine, according to a report Sunday in the Financial Times that cited a person familiar with the situation. Microsoft, which owns rival search engine Bing, has also reportedly approached other media giants about having their content removed from Google search results as well.

Microsoft representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The two companies have been linked discussing a Web-search partnership in the past. During Microsoft's failed bid for Yahoo in 2008, the tech giant was reportedly in "serious" talks with News Corp. to make a joint bid for Yahoo.

Murdoch, the chairman of a newspaper, TV, and Internet empire that includes The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, 20th Century Fox, Fox News, and Hulu, warned earlier this month that his sites may soon disappear from the search engine's listings. Murdoch accused search giants of "stealing" his company's content during a recent interview with Sky News Australia. When he was asked why he just doesn't pull his Web sites from Google's search results, he said: "I think we will. But that's when we start charging."

Murdoch and other News Corp. execs have said that they intend to charge readers and viewers for access to the company's content, forsaking the ad revenue model.

For several months, executives at some of the nation's most influential news sources, including The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, have been blaming Google and similar Web services for at least some of their deepening financial troubles.

Google sells ads tied to the news blurbs it "scrapes" from news sites. It links back to the Web sites from which it acquired the content but doesn't share ad revenue with them.

"Publishers put their content on the Web because they want it to be found," Google said in a statement earlier this month. "Very few choose not to include their material in Google News and Web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don't."

Critics of the media companies' bashing Google point out that if media companies were serious about not being indexed by search engines, they could accomplish the feat on their own by adding a robots.txt file to the root of their Web site containing a simple code that would prevent bots from indexing their pages.

NEW YORK--Web pioneer and conference honcho Tim O'Reilly warned the audience at the Web 2.0 Expo here on Tuesday afternoon that he thinks "we're headed into another ugly time." Namely, everybody is just being really nasty to each other. And it makes his hippie soul hurt.

For example, Rupert "Dr. Evil" Murdoch keeps threatening to pull News Corp.'s pay wall-guarded content from Google, perhaps offering an exclusive deal to another search engine for one hundred billion dollars (give or take a few bucks).

Those ubiquitous URL-shortening toolbars are throwing Web addresses behind a cloak of invisibility, O'Reilly said, and they "don't let you navigate freely like the Web used to work." With Google's Chrome hurling itself into the mix, the browser and operating-system wars are starting to look less "Mean Girls" and more "Aliens vs. Predator."

But O'Reilly's attitude isn't "bring it on, and get me a large popcorn with extra butter, while you're at it." Rather, he hinted that at least in some cases, he's willing to embrace Google as a big, cuddly, benevolent dictator in the midst of it all. It's "a monopoly that's a service of value to users," he said, adding that generally, when Google makes a product with the primary goal of one-upping the competition--Knol vs. Wikipedia, Checkout vs. PayPal--it's not a success.

That's probably because, at least right now, among all the giant robots stomping about the series of tubes, Google is the one that most resembles O'Reilly's vision of the "open Web." In a blog post prior to his speech, he predicted that Microsoft could take over this role. Or not. Either way, he insisted that "it's time for developers to take a stand."

Setting off this kind of electric shock in the Web's punditocracy is a great way to drum up attention and newsworthiness that doesn't have anything to do with philosophizing about the recession, extolling the possibilities of the real-time streaming Web, or predicting which dot-com figurehead is going to be the most plastered at South by Southwest this year. Thank goodness! That stuff was getting so boring!

And O'Reilly's rallying cry has already gathered reactions. Barbarian Group executive Rick Webb, for one, posted a colorful retaliatory blog post, in which he said that "setting aside the 'boo hoo, the Internet is becoming a bunch of walled gardens' arguments, when rational people have conversations about how to make the Web actually usable and not 95 percent piracy, spam, and fraud, almost every discussion starts with the proposition that there is no other realistic option but to chuck the whole thing and start over."

Of course, the Web should be in a state of "war." When have things been any different? It's a hub of innovation, competition, and constant change, and I think we all knew that already. The barrier to entry is low enough so that if there's a glaring problem with something, users will flock to whoever can create a better alternative. In fact, O'Reilly brought that up on Tuesday, when he talked about expensive in-car GPS navigation systems.

"The turn-by-turn directions from TeleAtlas cost $99 [on the iPhone], but Google is giving it away for free. This is a natural kind of extension for Google. I don't think Google is being evil here by being disruptive," O'Reilly said. "That's a massive user win, even though it is incredibly damaging to some existing companies and some existing business models. When Google offers free speech recognition, [that would be] an amazing win."

Is that legitimate innovation? Yes. But let's hope the "win" doesn't stop there. If Google manages to throw a sucker punch to Apple, Microsoft, or whoever else by offering something once-pricey for free, I should hope that the rest of the industry makes sure that it doesn't grow too complacent.

So let's get this straight: monopolies are bad, unless they're "nice" ones on behalf of companies that extol the virtues of Razor scooters, wheatgrass smoothies, and lava lamps. Competition is great, as long as everybody's nice to each other.

Doesn't quite make sense to me. But, hey, it's his show.

While it's waiting to be gobbled up by Google, AdMob isn't sitting still.

The mobile ad company announced Tuesday that it will deliver interactive video ads to the iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The ads, set to run this week, will let iPhone users surf the Web and check out other videos while the video ad is playing. AdMob believes advertisers and developers will take advantage of the video format by serving up interactive ads designed to pull in consumers.

"AdMob's new Interactive Video Ad Unit brings together consumers' love of watching videos on their mobile device with advertisers' goal of providing an interactive, social experience for consumers," said AdMob Founder and CEO Omar Hamoui in a statement. "We are excited to create new ways for advertisers to engage with consumers on their mobile devices and for the developers behind the most popular and engaging iPhone applications to effectively monetize."

The video ads will automatically pop up as iPhone users access certain content and applications. The ads will also offer a video player so that people can control and interact with them. To make sure the ads run at a decent clip, AdMob uses a network of distributed servers to push them out. Each video is saved in different file sizes, with the most appropriate one streamed based on the connection type, such as 3G or Wi-Fi.

AdMob is one of the top advertising providers for the handheld and portable device market, a position that convinced Google to cough up $750 million in stock to buy out the company. With its multimedia capabilities and huge market share, the iPhone has proven a fertile ground for video ads, with the first ones popping up in early 2008 and growing since then.

The revised Google Books settlement agreement may quiet international opponents, but it still gives Google a monopoly on commercializing out-of-print books where the copyrights are unclaimed and fails to protect consumer privacy, opponents said on Monday.

"We're at a cross roads," Internet Archive Director Brewster Kahle said during a panel late Monday on the Future of Books at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. "Is it going to be a subscription life...where one or two companies own the distribution and presentation (rights) to these books?"

In response, Google Books Engineering Director Dan Clancy said: "This is just one of a panoply of choices that people will have in the future."

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive director, and Dan Clancy, engineering director of Google Books, face off during a panel at the Commonwealth Club.

(Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET)

Google is scanning and digitizing books in libraries and publishers' catalogs so people can view and search them online and buy electronic versions. The company is striking deals with publishers for copyright-protected books and offering to pay rights holders to digitize out-of-print works, and will share revenue from sales with authors.

The agreement would settle a 2005 copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild over Google's book scanning plans.

Key concerns focus on licensing rights to so-called "orphan works" where the copyright holder is unknown, as well as books where the rights holder has not stepped forward--together estimated to represent more than half of the available works.

The modified settlement, filed in federal court in New York late on Friday, attempts to address U.S. Department of Justice concerns that the settlement would give Google unfair competitive advantages and violated copyright law.

Copyrights holders now have more control than they previously had. Authors and publishers were given seats on a Books Rights Registry board, a nonprofit that would be responsible for making payments and holding revenue from unclaimed works for up to 10 years. The registry is now required to search for copyright holders who have not yet come forward and revenue from unclaimed works will be used to locate copyright holders instead of for operations or distribution it to known copyright holders.

The revised settlement also could remove some of the heat Google was getting from governments in other countries over copyright concerns. Author and publisher groups in Germany, France, China, and elsewhere have voiced opposition to the Google Books plan. In response, Google, the Authors Guild, and other parties in the settlement excluded any out-of-print works not registered in the U.S. or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada.

"Just because they are taken out of the agreement doesn't mean Google will stop scanning their books," Pam Samuelson, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, said of the works from the other countries. "Google has already scanned many of their books."

Also troubling to critics is the fact that the revised settlement circumvents traditional copyright provisions by allowing Google to digitize orphan works without first getting rights holder permission, while any Google competitors are blocked from doing so barring legislation granting them licensing rights.

"For the millions of volumes of orphan books that Google has already scanned in, they can offer those without risk of anyone coming forward and suing them for infringement," said John Simpson, a consumer advocate at Consumer Watchdog.

The Justice Department's main concerns were not addressed, others added. (A DOJ spokeswoman did not return a call seeking comment.)

"The Department of Justice was trying to get them to also create a mechanism for licensing to third parties and the amended settlement agreement doesn't go that far," Samuelson said. "It creates a fiduciary for unclaimed books to potentially license unclaimed books at some point in the future, but only if Congress passes orphan works legislation."

Why monetize unclaimed works before getting permission?
Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, wrote on his blog: "Given that everyone is so positive that you CAN find rights holders for most of these unclaimed works, why not go out and find them first, then ask if they want to be included. Surely the settlement can generate enough money from books with known authors to fund that without having to include these books at the outset?"

"The Registry is trying to lay claim and charge for, monetize, works that have never been claimed and this is what causes the whole thing to be broken," Kahle of the Internet Archive said after the Commonwealth panel. The Internet Archive has been scanning books and archiving all types of media for years, but on nonprofit resources.

However, Clancy said most of the unclaimed works will eventually be claimed and predicted there would be legislation soon to resolve the matter. "We will have orphan works legislation before this thing is over ... [because of the settlement] people are pushing to resubmit it as we speak," he said.

Samuelson and other critics are worried that as a result of Google having the only comprehensive collection of out-of-print books, there will not be competitive pressure on the company to keep prices fair. "The risk of price gouging over time is very high and universities in particular have experienced excessive increases in prices of scholarly journals over the last few years," she said.

Samuelson reiterated her concerns about pricing at the Commonwealth panel event, adding that she doesn't think Google will price gouge in the immediate future, but that it could happen in the longer term. Clancy made no assurances but mentioned something about there being alternatives, like physical books, and that "the platform is there to provide the protections."

"The settlement is a total failure to address most of the problems the Justice Department raised and virtually all the problems raised by U.S. objectors and amicus [friends of the court] briefs," said Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer and leader in the Open Book Alliance, whose members include nonprofit author groups, library institutions, and Google rivals Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo.

"If we are going to allow Congress to [pass a law granting others licensing rights for orphaned works] why do we need a settlement?" said Reback. "The right way to do this would be to have Congress deal with it; not for Google to give itself a preference."

Of the settlement's handling of orphan works, James Grimmelman, a professor at New York Law School, writes on his blog that "It's a very clever hack. I have my doubts whether it's legal." Google remains "the only game in town" for unclaimed works, he said. (For more on the copyright implications of the settlement read Larry Downes' guest column on CNET News.)

The amended settlement also does not provide privacy protections for consumers that privacy advocates and authors including Michael Chabon, Bruce Schneier, and Jonathan Lethem had requested.

"One of our core privacy concerns with the settlement has been that reading records are not properly protected from disclosure to the government and third parties," the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California wrote in a blog post. "Readers should be able to use Google Book Search without worrying that the government or a third party is reading over their shoulder."

In response to Samuelson complaining at the Commonwealth event that the revised settlement offers no privacy protections for consumers, Google's Clancy said, "We didn't think the settlement was the right place to discuss this."

Updated 8:20 p.m. PST with Google, Internet Archive, and Samuelson comments at Commonwealth Club event Monday night.

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Larry Downes' bio below.

A month and a half after Google and the leading trade associations for publishers and authors withdrew their proposed settlement over Google Books, the parties on Friday filed a new version of the agreement.

The hope is that this new draft (now weighing in at 165 pages) will respond to the many objections to the original version, particularly those from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Significantly, the revised settlement excludes books published outside the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. And the registry that will collect royalties on sales of out-of-print works whose copyright owners are unknown will now act independently of Google. Some privacy concerns were also clarified. But I doubt that those who screamed the loudest will be satisfied with the changed document.

What the objectors--including most of Google's competitors, regulators, and a gaggle of overwrought law professors--seemed to dislike most was Google's audacity, specifically in using technology to solve a problem created by lawmakers in the first place. New objections, more attenuated and jargon-laded, will no doubt follow, until federal judge Denny Chin grabs the reigns of this increasingly unwieldy class action and steers it to resolution.

Let's back up. In 2004, Google began to scan all of the books languishing in some of the world's leading research libraries. Today, Google Books lets anyone search the contents of these libraries for free. For books whose copyright has expired, Google makes the entire text available and downloadable.

Citing possible copyright infringement, however, Google was sued in 2005 by the leading trade associations for authors and publishers. After three years of intensive negotiations, the two sides worked out a detailed settlement. The original agreement seemed to create a cheap and elegant solution to a problem that has plagued scholars, librarians, and ordinary readers for decades: how to provide low-cost access to books no longer in print but whose copyrights have yet to expire.

But then the objections began pouring into Judge Chin's chambers. The problem, according to most of these complaints, is that the agreement gives too much market power to Google over out-of-print books. How's that again? Out-of-print books, by definition, are those for which there is no market today, nor likely to be one any time in the future.

Thanks to advances in information technology, it may now be cost-effective to offer these works to their limited, if passionate, audiences. Google Books, in any case, is investing heavily to develop these markets. The revised settlement makes it even easier for potential competitors to do the same without having to rescan the old books. But let's not kid ourselves. It will be some time before we know if there's any revenue here worth fighting about, let alone an antitrust problem.

The real problem, which no one has the guts to face directly, is the sad state of copyright law. Copyright grants authors and their publishers the exclusive right to make copies of their work in order to encourage the growth of intellectual life, from novels to research papers to songs to cookbooks.

Lawmakers are supposed to balance that powerful control--in this case, a legal monopoly--against the value to consumers of letting information flow as freely as possible. That's a goal that has become fantastically easier and cheaper with the creation of the World Wide Web, high-resolution cell phone displays and other portable reading devices, and the digitization of just about all the world's information, much of it thanks to companies like Google.

Yet even as information distribution gets cheaper, entertainment industry lobbyists have pressured lawmakers to extend the copyright monopoly to absurd levels. The "fair use" exceptions have been all but eliminated through strategic litigating. Civil and criminal penalties for infringement are regularly enhanced, as recently as last year. In the only case of thousands brought by the recording industry that actually went to trial, a file-sharing user was found liable for nearly $2 million dollars in damages for sharing 24 songs. Yet the Obama Justice Department filed a brief supporting that penalty as "rational."

Worst of all, consumers must wait longer and longer for works to enter the public domain, where they can be freely copied, adapted, and sampled. As recently as 1909, a copyright lasted only 28 years in the United States. Since then, Congress has repeatedly extended it and applied the extensions retroactively. Today, copyright runs from the moment of creation until the death of the author, plus another 70 years.

Acknowledging that the U.S. Constitution requires copyright to be for "limited times," the late Congressman Sonny Bono once proposed changing the term to forever minus a day. No copyright on work produced by Disney has ever expired. That's not a coincidence.

Since most published works never make a profit, however, millions of books still under copyright are now out of print, existing only in the ghost towns of a few dingy library stacks. The authors of a growing number of these works are long dead, having made no provision for the inheritance of their rights. Since these books cannot be copied without permission, and no one knows who can give that permission, they inhabit a kind of intellectual limbo. Copyright scholars refer to them as "orphan works."

So far, Google has scanned 10 million books. Two million are old enough to be free of copyright, and another 2 million are still in print (Google has made separate agreements with the publishers of those books). The other 6 million are in copyright but out of print, many of them orphans. Thanks to the madness of recent copyright extensions, that category is certain to get bigger all the time. Congress has tried and failed for years to pass legislation dealing with orphan works.

In large part, the revised Google Books settlement would bring these books back to the world of the living. How? Copyright owners who don't want to participate in the deal must opt out of it, impossible by definition for orphan works. (The opt-out, to dispel a common myth, can occur at any time, not just before the settlement is approved.) So Google would have the right to make these books available in digital form, with any revenue going to a new nonprofit registry that will attempt to locate and compensate the owners.

Tellingly, the objectors say little to nothing about the impact of the settlement on consumers, who already benefit from Google's efforts and would benefit even more, if the agreement is approved.

The interests of information users ought to be the top priority of U.S. copyright officials, but Marybeth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights, condemned the original agreement. She spoke on behalf of the theoretical owners of orphan works--authors and publishers, in other words, who were given a powerful monopoly and then abandoned it. Peters accused Google and the organizations who sued the company of conspiring to execute an "end-run around copyright law as we know it."

There's the real problem. Copyright "as we know it" is a disaster and an embarrassment. Rather than complain about the ingenuity, leadership, and careful diplomacy of Google in trying to clean it up, why doesn't Peters focus on the job she was hired to do: urging Congress to bring copyright law in line with the realities of the 21st century?

Congress and its enthrallment to entertainment lobbyists created this mess. Reset the balance of copyright to something fair for authors and consumers, and all the objections to the Google Books settlement evaporate.