Copyright and licensing
Settlement reached in Google Library Project lawsuits
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After two years of negotiations, Google and author and publisher groups reached a proposed settlement that requires the approval of the presiding judge in a lawsuit over the search-engine company’s scanning of copyrighted books.
Under the settlement, reached in October 2008, Google was to pay $125 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit brought in 2005 by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate suit filed by five publishers representing the membership of the Association of American Publishers, according to American Libraries Online (Oct. 29, 2008). The payment would go toward creation of a book rights registry in which authors and publishers can register works and receive compensation from institutional subscriptions and book sales.
In return, Google may show as much as 20 percent of a book’s text to users at no charge, and the whole book will be available online for a fee. Libraries, universities, and other institutions are to be offered subscriptions for online access to large collections of those books. Google’s Book Search Library Project will continue to scan in-print books from publishers not among the 20,000 members of its Partner Program; they will be searchable, but none of the text will be available. Public and academic libraries in the United States will be offered free, full-text access to Google’s digitized collection at a single designated computer.
Google will share revenue from online book sales and advertisements with copyright holders.
Google partners Stanford University, the University of California, and University of Michigan announced their support for the settlement agreement in a joint news release. The ability to search and preview millions of books online “is a service that libraries, because of copyright restrictions, could not offer on their own,” said University of Michigan Librarian Paul N. Courant. The Harvard University Library, however, announced that it will not take part in the program’s scanning of copyright-protected works. One of the original library partners in the project, Harvard plans to continue its policy of allowing Google to scan only books whose copyrights have expired, the Harvard Crimson reported Oct. 30.
And a cofounding member of the Open Content Alliance, which was established several months after Google announced its book-scanning initiative, expressed doubts about the settlement. “On the one hand, one admires all of Google’s inventions,” Rick Prelinger, board president of the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit organization that hosts an online digital library of one million public-domain books, said in the Oct. 29 New York Times. “But when you start to see a single point of access developing for world culture, by default, it is disturbing.”
Corynne McSherry, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates Internet free-speech rights, said, “I kind of wish this case had gone to litigation. . . . A ruling from the court would have been good for everyone. It potentially could have fostered other offerings, based on that legal certainty” that would have stemmed from a Google win, she told the San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 29).
Finally, to help the library community better unscramble the complex terms and conditions of the settlement, the ALA and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) released “A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement,” by Jonathan Band. The guide outlines and simplifies the settlement’s provisions, with special emphasis on those that apply directly to libraries. Also, the executive boards of ALA, the ARL and the Association of College & Research Libraries will jointly file an amicus brief in federal court that identifies the library community's issues and concerns with the proposed settlement.
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