The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would 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. The agreement, reached after two years of negotiations, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by five large publishers as representatives of the AAP's membership. The class action is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.The agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form, by significantly expanding online access to works through Google Book Search, an ambitious effort to make millions of books searchable via the Web. The agreement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works.
If approved by the court, the agreement would provide:
More Access to Out-of-Print Books -- Generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these works and preview them online;
Additional Ways to Purchase Copyrighted Books -- Building off publishers' and authors' current efforts and further expanding the electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S., by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books;
Institutional Subscriptions to Millions of Books Online -- Offering a means for U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the world's most renowned libraries;
Free Access From U.S. Libraries -- Providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in U.S. public and university libraries; and
Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works -- Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.
Under the agreement, Google will make 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. The settlement agreement resolves Authors Guild v. Google, a class-action suit filed on September 20, 2005 by the Authors Guild and certain authors, and a suit filed on October 19, 2005 by five major publisher-members of the Association of American Publishers: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (NYSE: MHP) ; Pearson Education, Inc. and Penguin Group (USA) Inc., both part of Pearson (LSE: PSON) (NYSE: PSO) ; John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ; and Simon & Schuster, Inc. part of CBS Corporation (NYSE: CBS.A) (NYSE: CBS) . These lawsuits challenged Google's plan to digitize, search and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.
Holders worldwide of U.S. copyrights can register their works with the Book Rights Registry and receive compensation from institutional subscriptions, book sales, ad revenues and other possible revenue models, as well as a cash payment if their works have already been digitized.
Libraries at the Universities of California, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Stanford have provided input into the settlement and expect to participate in the project, including by making their collections available. Along with a number of other U.S. libraries that currently work with Google, their significant efforts to preserve, maintain and provide access to books have played a critical role in achieving this agreement and, through their anticipated participation, they are furthering such efforts while making books even more accessible to students, researchers and readers in the U.S. It is expected that additional libraries in the U.S. will participate in this project in the future.
Google Book Search users in the United States will be able to enjoy and purchase the products and services offered under the project. Outside the United States, the users' experience with Google Book Search will be unchanged, unless the offering of such products and services is authorized by the rightsholder of a book.
"It's hard work writing a book, and even harder work getting paid for it," said Roy Blount Jr., President of the Authors Guild. "As a reader and researcher, I'll be delighted to stop by my local library to browse the stacks of some of the world's great libraries. As an author, well, we appreciate payment when people use our work. This deal makes good sense."
"This historic settlement is a win for everyone," said Richard Sarnoff, Chairman of the Association of American Publishers. "From our perspective, the agreement creates an innovative framework for the use of copyrighted material in a rapidly digitizing world, serves readers by enabling broader access to a huge trove of hard-to-find books, and benefits the publishing community by establishing an attractive commercial model that offers both control and choice to the rightsholder."
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor," said Sergey Brin, co-founder & president of technology at Google. "While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips."
For more information about this agreement, including information about whether you may be a class member, please visit http://books.google.com/booksrightsholders.
1 comment:
EXPOSED - the fallacies of Google's universal search
Bravo! Congratulations authors and book publishers. I applaud you for holding your ground.
Ten (10) years ago this week, President Bill Clinton signed the revolutionary Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. Since then, everything in the copyright and technology industries in this country has changed ... and not all for the better, as you might have expected. You see, in their rush to bring our laws into sync with the international community, Congress failed to write a succinct and non-ambiguous bill ... and we need a succinct and non-ambiguous bill very badly. Believe me, I know. My small graphic arts content development company, Imageline, was in the middle of a $60 million federal lawsuit regarding copyright infringement at the exact same time.
The creative copyright defense lawyers in this country have all made their fortune over the past decade, defending and confusing people based on these DMCA ambiguities in copyright law. Maybe that was the Congressional plan all along. After all, most of the folks up in Washington are lawyers and judges themselves, now, also, aren't they?
Well, the rocket scientists, investment bankers, copyright lawyers, and software engineers in Redmond and Mountain View are apparently a hell of lot smarter than the politicians ... and way more devious. We learned that lesson the hard way, as well.
You see, web-based search, aka Adwords, was just about to start its meteoric rise to top of the world in the late 1990s. And the Google engineers were the only folks who had a clue how to make all of this work. Google began to dominate web-based search, went public, and set out on the path to organize and conquer the world.
I love web-based word search and even maintained an open mind as to the value proposition it creates for our economy as a whole. Plus, it was fun in the late 90's to see several U.S.-based companies still dominant on the global stage and spreading their technologies rapidly around the world. Perhaps for the first time, the gigantic digital divide we have in this world, would start to narrow? Pretty naive thinking now that I think about it.
But Google, and the companies that learned not to innovate, but to simply mimic the folks in Mountain View at every turn, apparently had another plan. They would expand "search" to images, video, published books, medical records, private homes, x-rays, and everything else on the planet ... and in outer space, for that matter. And now that they were so popular and successful, they wouldn't even bother to ask the disorganized and clueless creative people who own all of the copyrights for permission. Google set out to continue its Internet search and advertising dominance into image search, video search, book search, medical search, and other universal searches, including every other aspect of our lives, both public and private.
And no one had the guts to even question the Googlites, let alone try to stop them. All Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Ask.com could do was either beg Google to work with them or put teams of engineers in place to try and replicate the various Google search platforms almost identically. In other words, if stealing from people, promoting illegal products and services, and walking off the cliff, was good enough for mighty Google, then doing all of these things and walking off the cliff was fine with all the rest of them, as well. Really pretty disgusting for what had previously been viewed as an innovative proud industry, with good business practices and ethics, don't you think?
And then Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia), Daum (Korea), Lycos (Europe), Rediff (India), and other international search engine companies decided they wanted a piece of the action, as well. 'Image search', and practically everything else search, would become a common tool throughout the Internet world. After all, images are the world's common denominator, aren't they? Copyright holders be damned.
In the early days, most copyright holders caved. They were afraid of Google and new technologies they did not understand. Federal judges, who didn't really have a clue what was going on, allowed Google's massive army of lawyers to convince them that the DMCA, which was originally designed to protect copyright owners, was actually intended by Congress to provide a safe haven for technology companies who wanted to infringe, and to do anything they pleased with other people's property. Even if they made billions of dollars by doing so, they could still claim that their pirate ships could sail smoothly over the rough cyber seas and then pull safely into 'safe harbors' authorized by the DMCA. NONSENSE! This has been, and continues to be, one of the grandest corporate scams and get-rich-quick scandals this country has ever witnessed.
Unfortunately, the technology scams gained even more traction, and a more extended life, once the financial industry scandals up on Wall Street, and in the mortgage lending industries, started to surface and take center stage. Perhaps now it's time to held these technologhy cmpnaies accountable for their unlawful and unethical actions, as well.
So, here we are today. Four (4) major good news events for copyright owners have just recently occurred. Could it mean the end of Google's dominant evil ways? I sure hope so. And so do millions and millions of people who create most of our jobs and produce the vast majority of our copyrighted works in this country ... our small businesses and creative individuals ... our illustrators, designers, photographers, videographers, film producers, musicians, book publishers, cartoonists, journalists, graphic programmers, comic strip artists, poets, digitizers, and animators ... you get the picture. All of the people that the Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo executives, engineers, lawyers, and finance people hide back in the corner on the 18th floor.
Here is some of the recent good news for small businesses and copyright owners:
1. This week's news that Google has to pay book publishers and authors $125 million dollars and cease its plan to digitize all books, whether the copyright owners wanted them to or not. Microsoft apparently has already abandoned its Google clone in this arena. Yahoo supports a more open industry plan.
2. Courts in Germany have followed the wisdom of courts in Belgium and France and ruled against "Google Image Search" procedures, in a huge ruling that will hopefully set the new precedent on the global stage. Google can no longer 'willfully infringe for profit' says the court.
3. Courts in China have actually ruled against its own search engine giant, Baidu, as well as Yahoo China, and found their "image search" features pointing consumers to obviously infringing web sites were, indeed, unlawful ... even in China who leads the world in piracy these days.
4. The PRO-IP Act has been signed into law (October 13, 2008) here in the U.S., placing a spotlight on this kind of crime and giving both federal, state, and local authorites far more resources to investigate and prosecute intellectual property crimes in this country, and in the countries we trade with as well. Extended jail times and financial penalties should get everyone's attention, even if out-gunned plaintiffs attorneys have not been able to do so in the past.
Courts in the United States have fallen behind the rest of the world in this area, and it is shameful, indeed, since the vast majority of the world's copyrighted works are still produced here in America. But the copyright enforcement pendulum has finally started to swing the other way ... towards the hard working people who deserve to have their copyrighted works protected by the government in the country they live in. How can anyone debate that argument with a straight face. Google executives and attorneys apparently don't know how to make a straight face anymore, I'm afraid. They all appear to be crooked, or at least hypocritical, when it comes to the protection of other people's copyrights. Isn't Google's now famous CEO an attorney as well?
So, "bravo", again to book publishers and authors ... you held your ground. You did us all proud. You stood up to mighty Google. And all of the rest of us in the copyright industries are thrilled that you did so. THANK YOU!
Your publicly recognized settlement is a step in the right direction for all copyright holders in the U.S. from my point of view. And in other countries, as well. I, for one, believe the days of Google executives, investment bankers, software engineers, copyright lawyers, and rocket scientists making up their own self-serving rules of conduct and codes of ethics in this country are finally over. How there ever was a serious debate as to the legality of Google unilaterally deciding it could make illegal copies of any copyrighted material they chose to without the copyright owners permission is beyond me.
I say we have all had enough of this corporate greed, corruption, and scandal. How about you? In fact, I believe this is yet another symptom of the kind of crooked, top-down, corporate society we have lived under here in the United States for the past 8-10 years. Enough is enough.
Don't you think it is quite a coincidence that during this exact same time period Google accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars, while never really inventing or creating much of anything new and original themselves? You could, too, if you had virtually no 'costs of goods sold'.
Apparently, when you set your own rules and start to feel so powerful that you can ignore the laws of the land, this is what happens, folks. Ask George Bush and Dick Chaney. It's that pure and simple. How many Wall Street bailouts will we need to see before the rest of us open up our eyes?
'Book search' is just tip of the iceberg where the exposure of the true Google is concerned.. From what I can tell, 'image search' is emerging as perhaps the final Waterloo for mighty Google. Why? Because Google infringes more copyrighted visual material through its image and video search operations than virtually all other technology industry players combined. Hundreds of millions of copyright violations each and every month. An no one has thus far had the guts to stop them. No competitor ... no government agencies ... no judges ... no judiciary committees ... no Congressional hearings ... no copyright industry boycotts ... no nothing! Except perhaps for Viacom, who filed a billion dollar a lawsuit against YouTube/Google well over a year ago.
But an image and/or video search engine class action lawsuit, and one that is easily 10-15 times larger than the book search suit that just settled out of court, is imminent. I know of about a dozen companies, mine included, who are busy gathering documented evidence to help bring on such a suit. Hopefully, before Google wipes out half of the legitimate copyright owners in this country as it tries to do to digital photographers, illustrators, designers, digitizers, graphic programmers, and animators what it tried to do to authors and book publishers, as well.
"We have the right to copy and organize all of your digital images whether you want us to or not", says Google either directly or through inference.
Wait a second. My little company, Imageline, invented the software category of digital graphic arts content (clip art illustrations, design templates, digital logos, conceptual cartoons, and animations) back in in early 1980s when the Google founders were still in grade school. We do not want Google to organize our proprietary copyrighted images. They are already organized. And we don't want Google making copies of our digital artwork, either. That's a direct violation of the copyright laws in this country, and the rules under which we agreed to develop and produce these works in the first place long ago. All of our copyrighted works have been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in the exact way we were directed by Copyright Office officials.
Keep your corrupt hands off of our images, Google. Go play with your own photos, maps, or whatever it is that you produce and actually own.
In my view, the entire copyright industry, and the populous, in general, has become sick and tired of the arrogance, hypocrisy, and greed of Google. In spite of their "do no evil" mantra, Google has actually grown to compete with Microsoft for the title of the 'Supreme Evil Empire', in my opinion.
I, for one, am sick and tired of Google teaching my children that stealing is okay in the new digital age. No, it's not, Google! You are misguided and no one wants you to use the money provided by public shareholders and reputable advertsiers to copy other people's copyrighted works, buy more 757s, park them in your own back yard, explore outer space, give each other massages, or organize the world's information anymore, regardless of what your rocket scientists have to say.
The book publishers' victory is just the tip of one of the most toxic icebergs this country has ever seen. Wait and see.
Thanks for listening.
George Riddick
Chairman/CEO
Imageline, Inc.
griddick@imageline2.com
Post a Comment