Google Books case against publishers comes to an end
Yesterday, five l publishers of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) separately came to an agreement with Google, over the use of their books in the Google Books system.
For the past seven years, Google was involved in a lawsuit with publishers and the Author’s Guild over the scanning and printing of thousands of books for the Google Books program. Although the dispute with the Author’s Guild on the question whether Google infringes copyrights, is still on the table, reaching an agreement with the publishers is a great step forward for the Google Books program. Because of the agreement between Google and the publishers, Google can now argue that they have acquired consent of the publishers to use their content. By giving consent for the use of the books, the publishers took away the authors arguments of copyright-protection. For the Author’s Guild, this is a tedious turnaround.
Within the settlement, it is agreed that publishers can now "choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitized by Google for its Library Project."
In the statement, AAP and Google said: "Apart from the settlement, U.S. publishers can continue to make individual agreements with Google for use of their other digitally-scanned works."
How the Author’s Guild’s lawsuit against Google will turn out after this settlement is hard to say. The Author’s Guild’s copyright claims will be difficult to substantiate, since Google can argue consent from the publishers. For the authors involved with the AAP, it now seems logical to address their issue of fair compensation there. However, Google still uses snippets of books it does not have consent for yet, which is still an issue in the Author’s Guild lawsuit. Additionally, Google is involved in a dispute with French Publishers.
Read more about the Google Books case on Future of Copyright:
Sources: Ars Technica, Cnet.com
Written by: Nathalie Falot
Comments(2)
Patrick T.
This whole thing confuses me. How does consent from a publisher trump permission from the Copyright holder? I assume most of the time the publisher & Copyright holder are not one & the same.
N. Falot
Thank you for your reply.
In this particular case, Google came to an agreement with five major American publishers. It is important to distinguish between authors that are represented by these publishers, and other authors; since this is a private agreement, and not a court’s ruling, it is not binding to other authors or publishers than those taking part in the agreement.
In some cases, consent of the publishers certainly trumps the authors copyright; this is the case when an author has an agreement with a publisher, consisting of a full or partial transfer of the authors copyright (or neighbouring rights) to the publisher. In these cases, the publisher receives (at least) the distribution rights for the material. Therefore, when the publisher gives consent to Google for publishing those books, the authors can no longer argue unlawful use of, for example, the distribution right.
Of course, this agreement only binds authors which have an agreement with one of the publishers in question, and which have given those publishers (partial) copyrights. As for authors involved that have an agreement with other publishers, authors that did not transfer rights or authors with no publishers, this agreement between Google and AAP is of much less significance.
I hope this answers your question.
Your comment