Google, Publishers Reach Book Scan Settlement

Google and major book publishers have finally settled a seven-year legal battle over Google’s digital books project, which publishers say violates copyright laws. The deal is an about-face for Google, which up until now has maintained it did not need permission from copyright holders because it had a fair-use right under copyright law. A larger dispute with thousands of authors over the same alleged copyright infringement still remains.

The Google/Publisher book scan settlement, announced October 4, ends a federal class action lawsuit filed in 2005 after Google began scanning millions of books from university libraries without the rights holders’ permission to make “snippets” of those books available online in Google’s search engine.

Publishers and authors argued that Google needed explicit permission from them to do this, and that Google is illegally profiting from their works.

Google has maintained that the “snippets” were covered by fair-use provisions of copyright law, which covers certain purposes such as research, teaching, news reporting and commentary. Google said it did not need permission to copy the works or to provide brief snippets of them to make them searchable.

“Google made digital copies of books in order to create a searchable index linking each word found in any book to all books in which that word appears. That index provides a wealth of new information, allowing a user to find every book monitoring a particular topic or using a particular phrase together with up to three short snippets of text showing the context in which that term appears,” Google told the federal judge presiding over the Google book scan class action lawsuit in July.

In 2008, Google offered a $125 million class action settlement with publishers and authors, but it was rejected, in part, because it would have unfairly penalized authors who had not heard about the settlement because they would have to “opt-in” to receive any benefits.

Since then, authors have held their ground and refused to settle with Google. Their case, Authors Guild v. Google, is still pending against Google, and won class action certification in June.

“The publishers’ private settlement, whatever its terms, does not resolve the authors’ copyright infringement claims against Google,” Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken said in a statement. “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 US authors continues.”

Full terms of the Google/Publisher class action lawsuit settlement were not disclosed, but a spokeswoman for the publishers said the deal grants Google the rights to display up to 20 percent of the work and allows the company to sell the books via its digital marketplace, Google Play.

“In terms of coming to an agreement on what was fair use, it was an agreement to disagree,” the spokeswoman said. “We were able to get beyond that and establish business terms. Did we come up with a universal definition of fair use? No.”

Google said in a blog post that “the settlement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright-holders. U.S. publishers can choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitized by Google for its Library Project. Those deciding not to remove their works will have the option to receive a digital copy for their use.”

UPDATE 1: A federal judge preliminarily approved a $450 million Apple e-book class action settlement on Aug. 1, 2014. A Final Fairness Hearing is scheduled for Nov. 21, 2014.