Google, Publishers Settle Lawsuit over Book Scanning
From Publishers Weekly:
It’s over—at least for publishers. The Association of American Publishers (on behalf of five named publisher plaintiffs) and Google today announced they have settled their long-running litigation over Google’s library book scanning. According to a statement from the AAP, Google is said to “acknowledge the rights and interests of copyright-holders,” and U.S. publishers can “choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitized by Google for its Library Project.”
In addition, under the details released, publishers deciding to have their scanned works included in the Google database can opt to receive a digital copy for their use. Google director of strategic partnerships Tom Turvey told PW that publishers will own the scans provided to them by Google, and will have “broad” rights to commercialize them or make them available in other search engines.
. . . .
Nevertheless, the deal, in which the publisher suit is now dismissed, appears hardly worth such a lengthy court fight. “The publicly described terms sound indistinguishable from the terms Google has offered to its print partners for years.” New York Law School Professor James Grimmelmann observed. “If that’s all, it’s hard to understand why this deal took so long.”
. . . .
In its suit, the publishers had sought a declaration that Google’s scanning was copyright infringement, and an injunction barring the activity. Google countered that its scanning was fair use. The suit was later joined with a similar suit that had been filed by the Authors Guild. The Authors Guild litigation, meanwhile, is ongoing, although it has been stayed while the Second Circuit considers an appeal of Judge Chin’s decision to certify the case as a class action. Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken was clear that the guild suit is not affected by the deal with the publishers. “The publishers’ private settlement, whatever its terms, does not resolve the authors’ copyright infringement claims against Google. Google continues to profit from its use of millions of copyright-protected books without regard to authors’ rights, and our class-action lawsuit on behalf of U.S. authors continues,” Aiken said.
. . . .
Much has changed in the e-book market in the seven years since the lawsuit was first filed. For one, the chaos publishers predicted has not happened. Google has kept on scanning and indexing—and the sky did not fall. E-book commerce, at the same time has matured with a proliferation of e-readers and platforms—including Google Books, which allows users to browse up to 20% of books and then purchase e-books through Google Play.
“Basically when the case was filed seven years ago, that was a long time ago, and the world has changed a lot,” AAP president Tom Allen told PW.
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
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This case is what writers of my acquaintance trot out when they want to show me that the AG is active in pursuing the defense of authors. It’s sort of their showpiece, but it’s getting a bit tattered around the edges.
So, was this a good deal? A bad deal? Who won, who lost? Will authors get more money?
Okay, I get it. No one else knows either.
It’s a mystery.
“If that’s all, it’s hard to understand why this deal took so long.”
I’ll tell you why. The one part of this deal I never heard mentioned before was the part where Google gives the publishers the scans (and I assume, the OCR work?).
Now, likely Google offered that before, but it’s only now that publishers have come to realize just how valuable that service is.
@camille; yours is a most interesting question. Many authors, including myself, believe the scans done illegally, belong to us, not to publishers. It will be interesting to hear through the grapevine what the deal really was between Google and publishers. Dont know if G will give up scans. They consider themselves publisher, aggregator, bookstore with no power to the authors.
You completely missed what I was saying:
I was not talking about the intellectual property here. That’s what the case is about, yes, but the point here was what has changed: and imho that was the recognition of the value of the physical scans themselves. They’re like the old metal printing plates. No matter if the rights to the book had reverted, the plates belong to the press.
Scanning work, in an of itself, it extremely valuable, aside from the intellectual property aspect.
You, the author, have a backlist book you would like to publish, but it was written in the days of typewriters, and you do not have an electronic copy. You have to type or scan it yourself, then correct and edit it. That’s a huge amount of work.
And if someone does that work without permission from you, you still don’t own what they did. Their scans or files belong to them — they just can’t publish it, because the contents belong to you. But you don’t own the scans.
For publishers who are trying to put backlists up, this is a major expense (and headache) and IMHO one of the reasons they settled is because they realized that by getting the scans, Google was “paying” them in extremely valuable labor.
Who owns the IP is a separate issue.
I was responding Camille to your comment, only saying it was ‘interesting.’
I should have paragraphed after my first sentence to then state my own opinion about the article above. English is not my first language, but, I dont think I ‘completely missed’ what you were saying. I just continued onto a different subject. So, sorry for any confusion.
Just another comment entirely: Many of us have taken the time and care to scan and crosscheck/proof our works made not on typewriters, but on old word processors like the Amstraad, that could only keep minimal memory in the cpu.
On another note: Many of our publishers will pay for a destructive or non-destructive scan (very cheap and very quickly done) and request the authors (as free labor) proof the scans. Several authors I know have done that. As far as I know, backlist expense for publisher is not major expense in any way as scans are so cheap. Nor is it expensive for us privately, as authors for our own works in print.
The publishers, IF– and it’s an unproven point at this time– if Google has agreed to make scans available to them, only save time and a bit of scanning money. We are a small publisher, and scanning expense is nothing compared to proofing expenses.
Lastly, I’ve not yet read the remarks of the large agents’ groups on ‘the settlement’. I’m interested in what they will have to say as reps to those whose works have been scanned under Google’s ‘fair use’ claim for breaking copyrights, and IF those scans which are believed by many to be an unjust use of ‘fair use’ by taking the entire book, not transforming it in content, but placing it in a form that is a right belonging to the author specifically… my brush with law school says that if Google ‘invaded author’s rights’ (specific authors having no such electronic reaping clauses in their contracts prior on those specific books), and if publishers in any way agree to take on a form of an authors’ book that was ‘taken’ by Google…) these trades to publishers, may set off a class action suit by authors against their own publishers.
We’ll have to wait for all the facts and also see how Judge Chin rules in the next round w AG vs Google… there might be new precedent that publishers and Google may find encumbering or not. We’ll see.
In the meantime, our group is making inroads in gaining reviews for ebooks in one of the timehonored book reviews which to this point has only reviewed books print on paper. It helps when you’re a long-time contributing editor. lol. I think ebooks ought have reviews in stolid places, just as all other kinds of books. We shall see on that too.
Thanks
Camille has a good point about the work involved, but my question IS about the intellectual property. If a book was published in the days when electronic editions weren’t even conceived of and are mentioned nowhere in the contract, then the publisher doesn’t own the right to publish that e-book, no matter what arrangement they make with Google. Are the writers going to have to go back to court and sue their publishers over this? :/
It’s all fine to say that the ownership of the mechanical work of producing a scan is different from the ownership of the right to copy/publish an e-book — and yes, I see that it is — but the publishers have gotten really good at fuzzing those kinds of nuances lately. It looks to me like Google’s getting the publishers off their back by tossing them onto the authors’ backs.
What are the chances these publishers, or at least some of them, are going to start happily producing e-books once they get the scans from Google, figuring they’ll make more money selling the e-books than they’ll lose in lawsuits with the (probably few?) writers who’ll take them to court over it? [sigh] Any bets on how many writers won’t even realize they’re being messed over…?
Angie
good questions and insights Angie. And you could be right, re “Google’s getting the publishers off their back by tossing them onto the authors’ backs”. One of the things I know from ‘the inside’ is that Google really really doesnt want to deal with individual authors. Especially Google has never wanted under any circumstance an ‘opt in’ for each author. They doggedly fought to have every author they scanned to 1. know about their heist to be able to do anything about it, but did not make any specific and effective plan to notify by certified mail, each author so the authors knew where they stood and what they had to do to keep their work as they wished rather than have it swept up by Google like gold lying on the ground, and 2. For authors to write lengthy documents to certify their works and to ‘opt out’ of any current or future Google program regarding the book heists. The opt outs for authors with articles, anthologies, novels, non-fiction, poetry, op-eds, often amounted to pages and pages of work just to say no to Google’s scrape off.
That’s nearly enough to make me put in a “license” on my ebooks that says, “Google is not allowed to index this work.”