Google Settles Lawsuit With Book Authors in $125 Million Deal
Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: Google, Book, Search | Themes: Business, The Internet
Google this week settle a two year long copyright lawsuit with the Authors Guild of America and five members of the Association of American Publishers.
Roy Blount Jr, president of the Authors Guild, said in a statement that the Guild took legal action against the search giant, after Google struck deals with major university libraries to scan and copy millions of books in their collections. Blount explains that while many of these were older books in the public domain, millions of others were still under copyright protection. The Guild said Google’s scanning was “a plain and brazen violation of copyright law,” although the Mountain View company maintained that the digitizing of these books represented a “fair use” of the material, the Guild thought otherwise.
Google, the Guild and the Association of American Publishers yesterday announced that the three had come to an agreement with regard to already scanned copyright protected books and laid out prospective plans for future revenues. Google says it will give payments totaling $125 million. The money will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees. Blount said in a statement there will be at least $45 million for authors and publishers whose in-copyright books and other copyrighted texts have been scanned without permission
Blount went on to say that rights holders will receive a share of revenues from institutional subscriptions to the collection of books made available through Google Book Search under the settlement, as well as from sales of online consumer access to the books and will also be paid for printouts at public libraries, as well as for other uses.
Check out Google’s Book Search here.
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And the other $80M goes to ... the lawyers?
Yeah, the lawyers are the only ones who win here.
I don't know why the publishers or authors were so upset about this. Google doesn't make the book available, it just allows people to find out about it and read a couple of pages. That may lead to sales they would never have had otherwise.
That 80 million is a large chunk of cash...
Maybe you only preview the book for now...but be a little more realistic.
If you (as a company) are going to spend the time and money to go through the trouble of collecting and scanning ANY part of that many books...no idiot on the planet is only going to scan "a few pages". Thats like taking construction teams across a country and fixing "some" of the messed up roads. Its so inefficient its not defendable.
...Google wants to make the whole book available. That to me is a bigger accomplishment than all of the online maps and satellite images, internet radio, and online music purchases.
Can you imagine if RIAA got one big settlement back in the day and then just shut up? The fact that a major industry organization and five members of another publishers group have been appeased, and that there has been an effort to set up a system to compensate authors and publishers...thats huge. They just started doing this and already this industry is years ahead of online music as far as legal and copyright issues go.
People don't go to libraries as much because they can read wikipedia and other info online, only most of which is accurate. Now you can do BOTH without going to library and camping out in front of the copier.
No amount of crap from lawyers, other publishing groups, or anyone else...nothing really...can change the fact that this is major, major progress.