Google News: What's next for Google Books?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) March 28, 2011 -- The seven-year saga of Google’s attempts to scan millions of books in dozens of languages and offer them to readers around the world is far from over.

Over the next few months Google and its opponents in the copyright lawsuit over the massive book-scanning project will forge a new way forward. The project could take a new form. It could disappear. Or it could serve as an opportunity to enhance our information ecosystem in powerful new ways.

Last week, U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin rejected a class-action settlement between Google and the plaintiffs that sued Google for copyright infringement: The American Association of Publishers and the Author’s Guild.

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Google is not saying much about how the company is likely to proceed. So, many of us are just guessing. But we can explore the possibilities and assess the risks and benefits of each. Beyond that, there are two major legislative moves that we citizens can push for if we want companies like Google or institutions like libraries to be able to build impressive digital collections of the world’s knowledge.

The settlement had been on the table for two years as Chin studied it and many pundits and professors debated its merits. Chin ultimately decided for some fairly technical procedural reasons that a class-action settlement was not the right forum for a significant change in how copyright and publishing law should work.

Scanning effort announced in 2004
The whole story started back in 2004 when Google announced it would scan in millions of books from dozens of libraries around the world — many of the titles clearly still covered by copyright.

At first, Google tried to assert a “fair use” defense, claiming that the user would only see “snippets” of text when searching through a copyrighted work. If the work had been published before 1923 and thus is in the public domain, Google would offer the entire text. Under the original plan, Google pretended to be like a library. It had no plans to sell copies of the books it had scanned. It merely wanted to enhance its search services and fulfill its corporate mission, “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.”

But under the settlement agreed to in 2009, Google abandoned its pretentions to act as a library and instead embraced its new role as one of the leading vendors of electronic books. Google would not be liable for any of the copying it did before or after the settlement. Google would pay $45 million in damages to copyright holders. And Google would sell electronic copies of millions of out-of-print books, many of which are “orphaned” because no one can find the copyright holders now, for prices that Google alone would set.

Read More: http://www.prlog.org/11404107-google-user-whats-next-for-google-books.html

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