Google's One Million Books; Forbes, 8/28/09

Steve Pociask via Forbes; Google's One Million Books:

There is still major concern over Google's settlement with author and publisher groups.

"Imagine that your home and the homes of millions of your neighbors are burglarized. Now, say you catch the perpetrator and the case goes to trial. What would you expect--the return of all of your valuable possessions, stringent penalties for damages and jail time for the perpetrator? But instead, the judge agrees to a settlement that lets the perpetrator avoid any penalties, jail time or probation; he lets the perpetrator use the stolen contents for as long as he wants, provided he pays each victim a one-time fee per item; and, for those victims not knowing that their contents were stolen, the perpetrator can keep and use it, without any compensation or penalty at all. Would such a settlement seem fair?

While just an illustration, there are similarities to what is happening now in a court case involving online scanning and use of millions of books, which is in direct violation of copyright protections given to authors and, in this case, the Department of Justice has taken notice, as have a number of state attorneys general and the European Union's competition commission.

In the coming days, authors must decide whether to opt out of the settlement, and in the coming weeks Judge Denny Chin is likely to decide on a settlement involving copyright infringement claims against Google."

http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/google-book-copyright-opinions-contributors-steve-pociask.html

The New Rumpelstiltskin: Google Books; San Francisco Chronicle, 8/21/09

Michelle Richmond via San Francisco Chronicle; The New Rumpelstiltskin: Google Books:

"There's a new Rumpelstiltskin in town, but he's not going after the miller's daughter. This Rumpelstiltskin has set his sights on authors, who, according to critics, may unwittingly spin him buckets full of gold. Judging from the panic issuing from home offices and cafes across the country, you'd think he was trying to steal our firstborn.

I'm talking about Google Books, and a deal negotiated between the Internet giant and the Authors Guild: the Google Books Settlement.

Maggie Shiels of the BBC writes today about the late but noisy outcry from Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon, who protest the settlement on the grounds that it constitutes a monopoly on digitization of books. The naysayers in the Internet industry have a point, not to mention an enormous stake in the matter. But coming purely from an author's perspective, I feel quite a bit less alarmed than some of my colleagues.
I'm of a mind to believe that the settlement may actually be advantageous for authors. For one thing, we write books in the hopes that they will be read....

There's a wee bit of money involved, but not enough, at the outset, to be a determining factor unless you're truly a starving artist. Each author will get anywhere from $60 to $300 per book that was scanned by Google without authorization. That's enough to buy a few reams of paper or a nice bottle of Scotch, but not much else. In the future, authors will share with publishers 67% of the profits gleaned from digitization of their books, with 33% going to Google (therein the spun gold). Profits will presumably come from ads listed beside any page of a book, as well as from purchases of digital copies of the book--if the author chooses to allow this type of purchase. Ultimately, this could turn out to be a lot of money, but again, it's too early to tell.

That's really not so scary, is it? Of course, Rumpelstiltskin didn't appear scary either, when he first appeared to the miller's daughter, offering to help her spin gold for the king. It wasn't until later that he showed his true colors, and tried to make off with her baby."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/richmond/detail?entry_id=45958

The Google Book Settlement and the Fair Use Counterfactual; Social Science Research Network, 7/22/09

Matthew Sag, DePaul University College of Law via Social Science Research Network; The Google Book Settlement and the Fair Use Counterfactual:

"Abstract:

This Article compares the Settlement to the most likely outcome of the litigation the settlement resolves. The counterfactual I explore in some detail assumes that the court would have found that the digitization necessary to construct the Google book search engine was protected by copyright law’s fair use doctrine. Although this issue is now unlikely to be litigated, it is nonetheless essential to almost any frame of analysis of the Settlement.

I argue that the fair use issues in relation to the Google Book Search Library Project have been largely misunderstood. Although Google had a very strong set of arguments relating to fair use, it was not likely to receive the courts unqualified approval for its massive digitization effort. Instead, the most likely outcome of the litigation was that book digitization would qualify as a fair use so long as copyright owners were given the opportunity to opt out of inclusion in the book database and that opportunity was made freely available at a cost that was essentially trivial.

From this perspective, the terms of the settlement did not differ significantly from the most likely outcome of the litigation. Essentially, the opt out that fair use would likely have required has been replaced by the ability of copyright owners to opt out of the class-action settlement and the significant opt-out and modification opportunities within the settlement itself.

This Article contains a detailed discussion of the terms of the Settlement. "

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1437812