Google began yet another project in 2004, announcing that it
was working with several major libraries around the world to begin making their
holdings freely available on the Internet. Using sophisticated equipment, the
company began by scanning public-domain books from the libraries' collections.
The books were converted into portable document files (PDFs) that are fully searchable,
downloadable, and printable. Works still in copyright appeared only in
fragmented “snippet” form. Google Book Search digitized about one million books
per year in its initial years of operation.
In 2008 Google reached a legal settlement with two groups of
authors and publishers that had sought to stop the company from making passages
from their books available over the Internet. Google agreed to pay the groups
$125 million for past transgressions, but, the agreement allowed, users could
read for free up to 20 percent of each work scanned by Google, and, in exchange
for allowing copyrighted works to be read (in part) online, the authors and
publishers would receive 63 percent of all advertising revenue generated by
page views of their material on Google's Web site.
Google's expansion was fueled largely by keyword-based Web
advertising, which provided it with a sound footing to compete for dominance in
new Web services such as the delivery of video content. In January 2005 Google
launched Google Video, which enabled individuals to search the close-captioned
text from television broadcasts. A few months later Google began accepting
user-submitted videos, with the submitter setting the prices for others to
download and view the videos. In January 2006 Google Video Store opened, with
premium content from traditional media companies such as CBS
Corporation (television shows) and Sony
Corporation (movies). In June 2006 Google began
offering premium content for free but with ads.
For all of its marketing advantages, however, Google was
unable to overtake the leader in online videos, YouTube. Following its
introduction in 2005, YouTube quickly become the favourite site for users to
upload small video files, which often attracted millions of viewers. Unable to
generate anywhere near the same number of uploads and viewers, Google bought
YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock in November 2006. Rather than merging the
Web sites, however, Google continued YouTube's operation as before.
There were questions about how Google would cope
with the potential for copyright-infringement lawsuits over the copyrighted
content that some consumers included in their homemade videos without
permission and uploaded to YouTube. To reduce that risk, YouTube negotiated
deals with a number of entertainment companies that would allow copyrighted
video material to appear on its Web site and give YouTube users the right to
include certain copyrighted songs in their videos. It also agreed to remove
tens of thousands of copyrighted video files from its Web site. In November
2008 YouTube reached an agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Inc. (MGM), to show some of the studio's full-length movies and
television shows, the broadcasts being free to watch, with advertisements
running alongside the programs.
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