Google deal with book publishers overturned by court

Google’s vision of a universal virtual library has hit a snag in court . Using copyright and antitrust arguments, Google’s opponents successfully overturned a $125 million offer between Google and the publishing industry to complete the project. Even though the negotiation was declined, those involved in the offer said the ruling provided guidance as to how it will achieve approval in the future.

Settling on Google Books

There was a program called Google Books that was started. The idea of the program is to take all books that have been published and make them accessible on the internet digitally. The Association of American Publishers put together a lawsuit in 2005 with the Authors Guild. The book-scanning project got Google sued. Finding a way to pay authors and publishers for the novels being viewed was something Google agreed to do after having to pay $125 million up front in 2008. Many groups argued against the settlement such as Amazon, Microsoft, the Justice Department, foreign governments and copyright experts making it go into the legal system. On Tuesday, Manhattan federal court judge Denny Chin said the Google Books settlement would solidify the company’s search monopoly and give it the right to exploit published works without the permission of copyright holders.

The orphan works problem

Google Books would be able to digitize any book without permission unless the author and publisher opted out of the agreement because of a provision with Judge Chin objected to the most. An "opt-in" option was one Chin liked better. This was his suggestion. The opt-out provision was written due to an issue with so-called “orphan works.”. Anytime a book has a copyright holder that can't be found or is unknown, it is an orphan work. An opt-in would make it impossible to use orphan works, Google claims. The point of this was for Google Books to be able to contain orphan novels to be available to anyone. Opponents of the settlement said the availability of orphan works is an issue best addressed by Congress, not the settlement of a private lawsuit.

Sensing antitrust problems in there

Google defends its book-scanning project as an effort to “democratize knowledge” by offering every book ever written, which is about 130 million and counting, in accordance with the business. Antitrust issues are there also though. Nobody would be able to compete with such a complete library as Google would have with this program. Google would be in a position where it would never lose with Google Books having so several novels on the internet. Google has not wasted any time during the fights. About 15 million novels have been scanned by the company already. In Google's Book Search, you are able to find novels with expired copyrights also as 20 percent of copyrighted titles. On Google, sample texts are available for all copyrighted titles. It does not matter if they have been licensed or not.

Information from

New York Times

nytimes.com/2011/03/23/technology/23google.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Financial Times

ft.com/cms/s/2/f7ee4948-54bf-11e0-b1ed-00144feab49a.html#axzz1HR3IHDr1

PC World

pcworld.com/article/222963/judge_rejects_google_book_deal_over_monopoly_concerns.html