ISEdb.COM

As a final resolution for a lawsuit between authors, publishers and Google that has lasted over three years, the search engine giant has announced it will pay $125 mln for the right to scan, show previews of and sell individual copies of copyrighted, out-of-print works, provided the original author doesn’t opt out.

The settlement is said by many to be a landmark towards Sergey and Brin’s original goal to provide their users an easy way to access information stored in the world’s books, and both parties appear to be satisfied with the agreement — which still needs the court approval — since Google would be providing authors and publishing houses with a constant flow of revenue from the advertisement displayed near the book pages.

The initial dispute was on Google’s book search feature launched in late 2004; the search giant scanned books from universities such as Harvard, Stanford and the University of Michigan and uploaded them on their servers for everyone to see, even bringing book snippets in response to search queries. The program was launched without asking the permission of authors and publishers and even generated income from the contextual advertising displayed on the screen without compensating them.

This prompted the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers (AAP) to file a class-action lawsuit against Google back in 2005: now, after two years of negotiations, the parties seem to have reached a final agreement.

Google will create an independent, no-profit book registry with up-to-date information on out of print books and their respective copyright owners in order to resolve outstanding claims by authors; some $45 mln, or $60 per book, will also go to authors and publishers whose works have been scanned and put on Google servers without their explicit permission; finally, the rights holders contained in the registry will get about 63 percent of Google’s book search-related revenue.

In exchange, Google will be able to scan, show previews and of and sell individual copies of out-of-print works, unless the copyright holder chooses to opt out; the search engine will also get the right to scan copyrighted, in-print books, and to display them if the original author(s) and publisher(s) opt in. For both in- and out-of-print works, Google will be able to display up to 20 percent of the original work to the public and integrate the content to its search results. Public libraries will also get free access to books in Google’s database and will be able to view and print pages from books, but not copy text from them.

Since out-of-print, copyrighted books represent the vast majority of books in the world, a court ruling in favor of such agreement would mean that consumers will be able to search, preview and buy literally millions of rare books. Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, described the settlement as a great leap in the company mission to “organize the world’s information and make them universally accessible and useful”.

Among the critics of this settlement is Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, who said the agreement moves libraries toward a monoculture. According to an article appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle, she stated that Google might bring Google to become a worldwide, centralized librarian, and has been quoted saying: “This is not good for a society that is built on free speech. Let’s have the World Wide Web rather than the iTunes of books“. Another article by Mitch Ratcliffe appeared on ZDNet.com also points out that, unless the current publishing system faces a radical change with regard to digital products, authors might end up losing money and work opportunities from this deal.

A very thorough documentation of the settlement, including its full text in PDF format, frequently asked questions and a full history of the litigation, is available at the Author’s Guild website.