Google Deal Lets Authors Control, Be Paid for, Access to Online Works
Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers ended a three-year battle over claims that the search engine violated copyright law by digitizing millions of protected books for Google Book Search. The agreement announced Tuesday ends class-action suits by book authors and the guild, as well as separate litigation by five large publishers representing the AAP, the parties said. The settlement will boost Internet access to in-copyright works while allowing authors to control, and be paid for, access to their intellectual property, they said. The class-action deal must be approved by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
The agreement lets U.S. readers search for in-copyright works, including out-of-print books, the parties said. Users can preview up to 20 percent of an out-of-print work to help them decide whether to buy it, or purchase access to view a whole in-copyright book online at a price set by the rights holder or a Google algorithm, they said. Academic, corporate and government bodies can buy subscriptions allowing full access to in-copyright, out-of-print books, and public and university libraries can offer free, full-text online versions of such works at designated computers, they said. The agreement envisions future services such as print-on- demand and consumer subscriptions, they said.
The settlement acknowledges copyright owners’ rights, allowing them to control how their works are accessed online and to be compensated, the parties said. Google will pay $125 million, $34.5 million of which will fund a Book Rights Registry akin to ASCAP, they said. The registry will distribute payments earned from online access Google provides, locate rights holders, collect and maintain rights holder information and give copyright owners a way to opt into or out of the project, they said.
Google gets 37 percent of institutional subscription fees, with the remaining 63 percent going to the registry, Authors Guild Executive Director Paul Aiken said at a press briefing. Google will track usage and apportion the money based on the number of hits a book receives, he said. The registry will take a 10-20 percent administrative fee, said AAP Board Chairman Richard Sarnoff. Issues remain, such as how to weigh each hit in order to set the usage fee, Aiken said.
The remaining funds will go to existing claims by publishers and authors over Google’s digitization, searches and posting of snippets of protected works and its sharing of digital copies with libraries without copyright owners’ permission, the parties said. Authors and publishers whose works Google already has digitized will get around $60 per book and rights holders agreeing to leave their books in the program will receive a $200 inclusion fee, Sarnoff said. Google will pay legal fees, the parties said.
U.S. copyright holders can register works with the registry no matter where they are, but only Google Book Search users in the U.S. will be able to take advantage of the settlement, the parties said. Users outside the U.S. still can search full texts and see snippets of in-copyright works, but won’t be able to preview or purchase access to books online unless rights holders authorize it, they said.
Advertising will run below or around the frame of pages of text but not on the initial search results page, said David Drummond, Google senior vice president, corporate development, and chief legal officer. Advertising revenue will be shared with the book registry in the same 37:63 ratio, he said. “This is a brand new world” which Google hopes will prove a successful financial model, he said.
“Voluntary arrangements like this, where copyright owners have flexibility, are far superior and frankly can’t be compared to a compulsory model,” said Copyright Alliance Executive Director Patrick Ross. He hopes the market-driven system works as anticipated “and can be a model for future litigation” involving massive rights infringement, he said.
The settlement bears on no other infringement cases against Google, Drummond said. But Scott Cleland, blogging on The Precursor, said the search engine “de facto conceded” that it was infringing copyrights, “while also signalling it feared losing in court.” It remains to be seen if this is a one-time deal or whether Google is in “Settlements R Us mode,” Cleland said.