The major newspapers are reporting the settlement deal just reached (or at least announced) Tuesday by Google with publishing groups that had sued to stop Google’s plans to digitize books and eventually make their content fully available online.  The deal, whose contours took 29 months to broker, is big:  having been sued for proposing what publishers saw as a “massive infringement” of the copyright regime, Google’s agreement to settle the two major lawsuits for $125 million (one filed by the Author’s Guild, the other by the Association of American Publishers on behalf of its 300 publishing house members) has been described by Paul Aiken, the Guild’s executive director, as the “biggest book deal in U.S. publishing history.”  

 

Here is what the deal, which has to be approved next summer by a federal district court sitting in New York, would do:  while allowing Google to make available book excerpts from literally millions of out-of-print and copyrighted volumes (readers would then be connected to a mechanism allowing them to buy the whole thing), Google agreed to fund the creation of a Book Rights Registry.  This registry, which follows the model of ASCAP (which handles copyright for the music industry), will function both as the repository to handle copyright claims and also to collect significant royalties for publishers (63%) gathered when readers decide they want the full book (Google gets the rest).  The registry will start with the litigants in the original 2005 lawsuit (AAP includes McGraw Hill, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Wiley & Sons, and Pearson, and many others) but others can join it if they want (meanwhile, authors involved in the suit who hate the settlement will also be allowed to opt out of the new system).  About $45 million of the settlement money will be used to compensate authors whose books had already been scanned by Google before the deal was struck.

 

The broad significance of this arrangement is that it puts into place, really for the first time, an architecture able to suture the cross-cutting financial and ownership claims of the old (books) and new (digital) media, and in a way that returns royalty income to the original publishers while also making available millions of books still under copyright but not being currently printed (so far Google has already scanned seven million books).  While the lawsuits were pending, Google simply made short clips available (a search would pull up the page on which sought terms appeared and the couple sentences before and after).  Now, up to twenty percent of the volume can be displayed, and universities and colleges who buy access subscriptions will gain for their users full access, in effect adding millions of books to a given college’s library collection in an instant.  And presumably the arrangement provides an incentive for other university libraries also to make available their collections for scanning, since by doing so they benefit from the collectively mammoth research database now likely to emerge.  

 

The potential implications for scholarship are staggering, especially since the scanning scheme makes archived books full-text searchable.  Paul Courant, librarian at the University of Michigan (one of the original partners in the Google project, along with the Universities of California and Wisconsin, and Stanford University), said the deal “is an extraordinary accomplishment, [since] it will now be possible, even easy, for anyone to access these great collections from anywhere in the United States” (the deal limits online circulation to the U.S. given the larger complexities that arise under the international copyright regime).  Daniel Greenstein, a vice provost in the university of California system, said in a press release that “Millions of books are held in our libraries as a public trust.  This settlement will help provide broad access to them as well as other public benefits, and it also promises to promote innovation in scholarship.”  And because machine-readable text can be size and format manipulated, millions of books suddenly also become available to researchers with so-called “print disabilities.”

 

 

Interestingly, the main issue that prompted the lawsuits in the first place, namely whether Google’s use of snippets (that showed once an online search was performed) was allowed under the copyright “fair use” doctrine or not (the circuit courts have been divided on the question) is not resolved by the new settlement.  And despite the big breakthrough on book scanning, even bigger fish are yet to be fried:  Viacom still has a one billion dollar suit pending that charges Google’s popular YouTube service with pirating and profiting from protected programming that is clipped and uploaded there.  But having settled now with the book publishers and some of the major journalism organizations (the AP news service had sued Google for excerpting news content but came to agreement in 2006), a model may have now emerged with viability across all the converged media.