Tech & Biz

Google copyright lawsuit, landmark settlement with US publishers

by Tina Kells | October 28, 2008 at 12:34 pm

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Google has reached a landmark settlement in a copyright lawsuit launched by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers that could impact the way that copyright law is dealt with online. The deal will see Google exclusively host a platform that will bring millions of books that are currently under copyright to the Internet.

The agreement comes as part of a settlement to a class-action copyright violation lawsuit, Authors Guild v. Google, launched in 2005 that claimed Google habitually engaged in "willful (copyright) infringement to further its own commercial purposes." The lawsuit challenged plans proposed by Google to display snippets of copyrighted material in search results, as well as offer digitalized versions of books to libraries.

Under the terms of the lawsuit settlement Google will pay $125 million to establish a Book Rights Registry to settle unresolved claims by authors who have had their copyright violated by Google in the past. Authors of previously indexed works can file with the Book Rights Registry to collect compensation for unauthorized digitalized copies of their work.

The deal will further allow Google the rights to continue to distribute information via the Google Books Search, and will offer American users the ability to directly purchase products and services from the search results page. The Google Books Search user experience for those outside of the United States will remain unchanged, but Google will exclude certain work from search as requested by the copyright holder.

According to a statement issued Tuesday by the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and Google, the agreement "will expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search."

If approved by a federal court in Manhattan, the settlement will end the legal action, taken against Google two years ago, that had been closely followed by the publishing industry as it debates how copyright law should work online.

Under the Google Print Library Project, millions of copyrighted books are to be indexed on the Internet. Google has called the project an invaluable chance for books to receive increased exposure. But in papers filed in 2005 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the publishers association cited the "continuing, irreparable and imminent harm publishers are suffering ... due to Google's willful (copyright) infringement to further its own commercial purposes."