Google Book Search
Posted by arnulfo on 2009/10/31
from:
Judge Chin also echoed comments made by the Justice Department last week that the settlement, if properly revised, could offer great benefits, most notably, by providing broad access to to millions of out-of-print books that are largely locked up in a small group of university libraries.
“The settlement would offer many benefits to society, as recognized by supporters of the settlement as well as D.O.J.,” he wrote, referring to theDepartment of Justice, which filed its own brief in the case last week. “It would appear that if a fair and reasonable settlement can be struck, the public would benefit.”
Google Book Search is the ambitious plan to digitize every book – famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth – found in the world’s libraries, as part of the company’s core mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Beginning in 2002 as a “secret books project,” according to an official history at the Google site, Google Book Search has become a planned multibillion-dollar effort that has had to overcome many obstacles, both the sheer effort of scanning so many pages of text as well as conforming to copyright laws.
Google started in 2004 to team with many of the greatest library collections in the world — the New York Public Library, the University of Michigan, Harvard and Stanford, among others — to digitize their collections, paying the scanning costs. Google expects to scan 15 million books from those collections over the next decade.
In October 2008, Google reached a settlement with authors and publishers to end a class-action lawsuit that challenged the legality of the scanning project. Under the agreement, Google will pay $125 million and create the framework for a new system that will channel payments from book sales, advertising revenue and other fees to authors and publishers, with Google collecting a cut.
The $125 million will go to compensate authors and publishers whose books are still under copyright and help find the copyright holders for so-called “orphan works,” out-of-print books that are still within the law. These copyright holders, who are considered part of the group, or class, that settled with Google, are hard to find, since many never expected their works ever to be in print again. It is the resurrection of these works — making them available at the click of a mouse — that many consider among the greatest benefits of Google Book Search. That, and the millions of public domain works that will be easily searched and called up by computer users around world.
The proposed settlement has attracted opposition from various corners of the book world, and the Department of Justice has opened an antitrust investigation. Late on Sept. 18., 2009, the Justice Department said the proposed legal settlement between Google and book authors and publishers should not be approved by the court without modifications.
