The recent contretemps over Google's Digital Library plan proves that the essential conflict between copyright and connectivity has not been resolved.

I was chilled by this comment from Karl Auerbach, (right, the cartoon featured on his home page) former ICANN governor and certified "good guy" of Internet governance, to Dave Farber's list:

I've become concerned with how search engine companies are making a buck off of web-based works without letting the authors share in the wealth.

I've looked at my web logs and noticed the intense degree to which search engine companies dredge through my writings - which are explicitly marked as copyrighted and published subject to a clearly articulated license.

The search engine companies take my works and from those they create derivative works.

The search engine companies don't ask my permission. Rather they presume that they have the right to create these derivative works unless I create an explicit denial via a robots.txt file.

The search engine companies generate revenue by making use of the derivative works they have created from my original works. I, as the author and copyright owner of the underlying work, am not given any share of that revenue stream.

Yes, I gain visibility because the search engines create means to find my writings.

Perhaps that would be a reasonable bargain to make - if the opportunity to make such a bargain were actually presented.

But the search engine companies take the position that that bargain exists unless the copyright owner of the original work goes through the effort to say "no". That is an inversion of the normal state of affairs.

I am increasingly coming to the opinion that some portion of the revenues received by search engine companies should flow to the creators and copyright holders of the original works that are indexed via the derivative works made by the search engines.

How might such a mechanism work? I haven't really thought much about
that. But we know that such systems are possible and exist in the real world. For example we consumers are already being subject to actual or threatened fees on blank media and devices that might be used to make copies of works. And the music industry has intricate systems to move money from broadcasters to those who created the works in the first place (or to their successors.)

Perhaps those of us who write original internet-based materials (e.g. blogs, articles, emails) ought to take a page from UCITA-type shrink-wrap thinking and have the license on our materials impose an obligation to pay something like 20% of the gross revenues arising out of their use of any derivatives they make from our works.

Cavebear Records, anyone? You see, this is how the Web works. This is the basic structure of the Web we're talking about. Linking is the default. There are technologies for opting-out of links (and disallowing my copy of your logo), but you have to employ them.

But suddenly there's a honeypot of money, value spun from nothing, and everyone wants a taste. The duck, the goose, the cow, even the Cavebear.

But it's the Little Red Hen at Google (image from the Baldwin Project) who sent these spiders on their way, and it was Tim Berners-Lee who created the basic architecture on which they ride. The only way to provide compensation is to change the nature of the system.

Which is exactly what the music and movie industries have been saying all along.

So which side do you fall on? Is it learning or the dollar? I know, I know, we'd all like to be compensated for what we write. But that's what business models are for. Not just advertising, but paid writing, speeches, consulting. Works for IBM.

Of course, on the other hand, royalties look so lush. And Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, you have so much, while we have so little. Why can't you share?

Because if they refuse, and we all pull our content back as a result, there's no more Web, that's why.

What I said earlier about translucense applies here as well. Computing is binary. People want to be analog. And we face hard choices.

No one knows how hard the choices really are until they face them.