Google Books

Federal Judge Denny Chin has rejected a class action settlement that Google had reached with a coalition of authors and publishers, saying the settlement "would simply go too far."

Chin continued, that the settlement would "grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners," and give Google "a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case."

The Google books project was challenged in federal court by the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers. In 2009 a settlement between the parties was reached, stating that Google could create a registry of books and pay $125 million to people whose copyrighted books have been scanned and to locate the authors of scanned books who have not come forward, Reuters reports. The settlement, Bloomberg notes, would have also provided Google "immunity from copyright laws, allowing the company to distribute millions of books on the Internet in exchange for sharing the revenue it would generate."

Responding to Judge Chin's 48-page opinion, the Authors Guild said in a press statement that it "lauds the many benefits of the settlement," and "has left the door open for a revised agreement. In his conclusion, Judge Chin says that ‘many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA [the Amended Settlement Agreement] were converted from an ‘opt-out' settlement to an ‘opt-in settlement. I urge the parties to consider revising the ASA accordingly.'"

Hillary Ware, a managing counsel for Google, expressed disappointment in Chin's opinion, saying the company was considering its options," The Wall Street Journal reports.

"Like many others," Ware added, "we believe this agreement has the potential to open-up access to millions of books that are currently hard to find in the U.S. today."

In an ACS Issue Brief, James Grimmelmann, a law professor at New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, examined the Google Books settlement. David Balto, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress also explored the settlement in this guest post for ACSblog.

In a recent press statement, the Department of Justice urged Judge Denny Chin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to decline the settlement, and said that the "parties should be encouraged to continue their productive discussions to address those concerns."

James Grimmelmann, an associate professor of the Institute for Information and Law at New York Law School and author of an ACS Issue Brief on the settlement, told The Times:

The news out of this is that there are frantic negotiations going on in back rooms right now. The parties are scared enough to be talking seriously about changes, with each other and the government. The government is being the stern parent making them do it.

Grimmelmann's Issue Brief explored some of the public interest concerns that have arisen from the settlement, such as who will control copyright ownership of "orphan works," which are books whose authors or rights holders cannot be found.

In its statement on the proposed settlement, the DOJ also expressed concern about several aspects of it and urged the parties to "consider a number of changes to the agreement that may help address the United States' concerns, including imposing limitations on the most open-ended provisions for future licensing, eliminating potential conflicts among class members, providing additional protections for unknown rights holders, addressing the concerns of foreign authors and publishers, eliminating the joint-pricing mechanisms among publishers and authors, and, whatever the settlement's ultimate scope, providing some mechanism by which Google's competitors can gain comparable access."

In a guest ACSblog post, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow David Balto responded to critics of the settlement, calling it "good for consumers" and urging the federal court to accept it.