Rampant inflation of copyright, and literary monopolies

Interesting essay on the future of books in the New York Times today, showing that the outcome of the recent Google settlement is far from clear and that the issue of copyright has veen wrested from the ideals of protecting knowledge to one of protecting profit. The point that struck me was the 400% inflation in the time copyright applies over the last 300 years:

...copyright was created in Great Britain by the Statute of Anne in 1710 for the purpose of curbing the monopolistic practices of the London Stationers' Company and also, as its title proclaimed, "for the encouragement of learning." At that time, Parliament set the length of copyright at fourteen years, renewable only once. The Stationers attempted to defend their monopoly of publishing and the book trade by arguing for perpetual copyright in a long series of court cases. But they lost in the definitive ruling of Donaldson v. Becket in 1774.

US law by and large backed up the British concept of 28 years, but in the last few decades corporate influence has swayed legislators considerably:

According to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (also known as "the Mickey Mouse Protection Act," because Mickey was about to fall into the public domain), it lasts as long as the life of the author plus seventy years. In practice, that normally would mean more than a century.

So - extension for a maximum of 28 years to c 140 years - this is hardly what one would call progress over 300 years. The current agreement with Google, while it stops them pwning the entire world's literary output, still essentially just extends the cabal of those who do have the rights by one extra big corporate. And no ordinary corporate - as the article notes:

No one can predict what will happen. We can only read the terms of the settlement and guess about the future. If Google makes available, at a reasonable price, the combined holdings of all the major US libraries, who would not applaud? Would we not prefer a world in which this immense corpus of digitized books is accessible, even at a high price, to one in which it did not exist?

Perhaps, but the settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company. Apart from Wikipedia, Google already controls the means of access to information online for most Americans, whether they want to find out about people, goods, places, or almost anything. In addition to the original "Big Google," we have Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Images, Google Labs, Google Finance, Google Arts, Google Food, Google Sports, Google Health, Google Checkout, Google Alerts, and many more Google enterprises on the way. Now Google Book Search promises to create the largest library and the largest book business that have ever existed.

So, who will raise the beacon of anti-trust then?