Posted by Jonathan Adler:
Beware the Google Book Settlement?
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_29-2009_04_04.shtml#1238385153
I don't know much about IP, nor the class-action litigation against
Google for digitizing books, but [1]this op-ed by Lynn Chu makes me
think I should be concerned about the suit's potential settlement.
After Google began digitizing the University of Michigan library in
2004, the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and
a handful of authors and publishers filed a class-action lawsuit
for copyright infringement. Last November, those "class
representatives" reached an out-of-court settlement with Google
that would, if approved by the federal court, permit Google to post
out-of-print books for reading, sales, institutional licensing, ad
sales, and other publishing exploitations, by Google, online. The
settlement gives the class-action attorneys $30 million; a new,
quasi-judicial bureaucracy called the Book Rights Registry $35
million (more on this later); and $45 million for owners infringed
up to now -- about $60 a title. It remains subject to a final
fairness hearing, slated for June 11.
No one elected these "class representatives" to represent America's
tens of thousands of authors and publishers to convey their digital
rights to Google. Nor are the interests of this so-called class
identical. There is nothing more individual in the world than a
book, an author, a publisher, and the value of a contract. The
aging baby boomers now flacking the settlement don't seem to
understand that PDF scanning (how Google and everyone else
digitizes books) isn't rocket science; it's cheap and easy. Books
will be digitized without Google. But the Google settlement sets in
amber today's overhyped role of the Internet, ruled by that great
and magnificent Oz -- Google.
Sound like hyperbole? Consider this: Under the settlement, every
rights-owner in America is supposed to hand over all their private
contract data, on every edition of every work they ever wrote --
and every excerpt permission ever granted to others -- at the peril
of losing the money Google will be making on their backs. This is a
massive burden on everyone in the book industry, making us all, in
effect, Google's data-entry slaves. Indeed, in most cases such
information about every permission ever granted is unlocatable. It
opens a Pandora's box of disputes and mistaken claims about who
actually owns what.
I would be interested to hear what those who know more about
copyright, and the specific claims at issue here, think about this.
References
1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123819841868261921.html
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