I've decided to use this week's blog entry to give everyone an update on Google's massive book scanning project. After searching for and reading news stories about copyright infringement for ten weeks it seems to me like this story is the most talked about and it is definitely the only copyright story which has intelligent people who feel very strongly on two sides of the debate. As I reported in an earlier post Google has decided to attempt to make most of the world's books available to the public online at any time. When Google announced this plan to make so many out of print books available online they were sued for copyright infringement by various entities representing authors. Google had decided to make a profit from the distribution of some of these books without making any payments to the authors. Many of the out of print books in question have been out of circulation for many years and it is unclear who holds the copyrights to these works. These books are called orphan books.
After the lawsuit was initiated Google negotiated with the author's guild, a group that represents American authors, and others in order to come to an agreement that would allow Google to publish the books in exchange for assurances that royalties would be paid to known copyright holders. Many groups were unhappy about this proposed settlement and the Justice Department stepped in and told Google that the deal was illegal and needed to be revised. Please see the previous post "Google is stealing orphans" for the full backstory.
This last week Google and the Author's Guild submitted a revised agreement to a federal judge for approval. Google stepped back on some issues and decided to fight on some others. First of all Google has decided that its agreement with the Author's Guild should only apply to books from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia. This is significant because some of the fiercest backlash to the proposed deal had come from foreign governments like France, Germany, and especially China. Earlier one of my fellow students commented on my blog and asked me if China ever gets any of its intellectual property stolen, but the Chinese have apparently avoided becoming a victim in this case. This is ironic when you consider the fact that China is the world's biggest infringer.
Google has also agreed to change its plans for the funds obtained from the sale of "orphan works". Instead of holding the funds itself for five years as originally suggested, Google has agreed to turn the funds over to a third party fiduciary who would hold the funds for ten years and then donate them to charity. 25% of the orphan money would go towards trying to find these missing authors or their heirs. So at least in the new agreement Google has promised to try and find to the orphans' real parents after stepdaddy Google has sold the kids down the river. Google also explicitly promises in the new agreement to allow its competitors such as Barnes and Noble and Amazon a right to access the online database and to make sales from it as well.
This is a story where our government actually seems to have functioned pretty well. The Department of Justice stepped in in this case and stopped Google from obtaining an illegal monopoly over the world's printed knowledge, and still found a way to allow many of these fantastic books to be accessed by the public.
Here are some links to great web pages about this story. I have a link to Google's official statement about the new agreement and a link which leads you to the actual agreement submitted to federal court.
http://searchengineland.com/revised-google-book-settlement-filed-29814
http://www.openbookalliance.org/2009/11/is-the-google-settlement-worth-the-wait/
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/11/google_books_sc.html
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/11/modifications-to-google-books.html
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