It is impossible not to be awed with the thing.
Almost three years in the negotiating, and weighing in at 134 pages plus appendices, the Google Settlement would impress by size alone. But it is far more: Its effect, assuming it receives court approval as scheduled in June, will be staggering.
It promises to create a vast, searchable, online library for readers in the United States, easily dwarfing that of the Library of Congress, and including millions of out-of-print books from around the world.
It has the potential to reconfigure radically the marketplace for books, catapulting a traditional industry into the digital beyond.
It will effectively rewrite the copyright rule book between Google and just about every publisher and author on the planet.
And its effect on libraries will be enormous.
The position of power Google will occupy, as owner of a database comprising the combined holdings of the greatest U.S. research libraries, is simply breathtaking. And worrisome.
The Google Settlement is the proposed resolution of two lawsuits: a class action filed against Google in Sept., 2005, by book authors and the American Authors Guild; and a separate action brought a month later by five major American publishers representing members of the Association of American Publishers.
The dispute concerned the ambitious, audacious, Google Library Project, launched in 2004, and in which it has been scanning the collections of a dozen major American libraries, including Harvard University and the New York Public Library.
As of last November, Google had digitized more than seven million books, roughly one million in the public domain, 2.5 million in copyright and in print, and 3.5 million in copyright but out of print. Users have had free access to the full text of public domain books in this “digital library” database through Google Book Search, and have been able to view a few relevant lines of text – “snippets” – of copyright-protected books. The lawsuits charged that doing this without permission violated the copyrights of book publishers and authors.
Under the proposed settlement, announced Oct. 28, 2008, Google must pay $125-million U.S.: $45-million for cash settlements to authors and publishers of books Google has digitized without permission by May 5, 2009 (a minimum of $60 U.S. per book); $34.5-million to establish a Book Registry, that is, a rights-holder database to administer payments to, and inclusion or exclusion requests from, authors and publishers; and the balance for legal fees.
Notice is now going out to the huge class of those affected: authors and publishers having a U.S. copyright interest in books published on or before Jan. 5, 2009. And this, due to the operation of international copyright conventions, is practically anyone who has written and published a book prior to that date that is still within the U.S. term of copyright protection, in any language, in almost any country, including Canada, whether or not the book was ever published in the U.S.
The settlement is astonishing in its scope. If approved, it will permit Google, on a non-exclusive basis, to continue to digitize books from any source, and to maintain, expand and sell access to its enormous digital library in a number of specified ways.
Google will, for example, be able to offer an online “institutional subscription” to U.S.-based academic, government and corporate institutions under which users can view, copy/paste, annotate and print pages. Individual consumers will be able to preview parts of a book free of charge, and purchase online access to an individual book for viewing, copy/pasting, and printing. Google will be permitted to sell advertising on online book pages, display snippets and bibliographic pages and may, eventually, make other revenue-generating uses.
