Digital libraries and Copyright: Judge rejects Google Books Settlement

Google Inc.'s six-year struggle to bring all the world's books to the Internet suffered another big setback at the hands of a federal judge. Judge Denny Chin, in a ruling filed in U.S. district court in Manhattan, rejected a 2008 settlement that Google forged with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers to make millions of books available via Google Books.

The decision is the latest in a series of blows to the ambitious plans of Google co-founder Larry Page to scan the world's 150 million or so books and make them accessible to users of Google's Web-search engine, an idea he broached shortly after the company was formed in 1998.

Google in late 2004 said it was working with several libraries to scan and digitize books and other writings in their collections, and has said it has completed 10% of the effort.

The settlement, among other things, blessed Google's scanning efforts and also potentially allowed for ads to be shown on the book pages online. Google agreed to pay $125 million to establish a registry to allow authors and publishers to register their works and get paid when their titles are viewed online. It also allowed copyright owners to prevent Google from scanning their works and to collect money for each work that was previously scanned by Google. For out-of-print but copyrighted books, the plan offered a chance for digital access.

But those who objected to the settlement, including the Justice Department, said Google would unfairly take advantage of millions of "orphaned" works whose content owners haven't been identified, or in cases where the copyright ownership is debated.

The 48-page decision concludes that the $125 million deal would give the Internet giant the ability to "exploit" books without the permission of copyright owners, echoing the U.S. Justice Department's concerns about the deal.

“While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many," Judge Chin wrote, Google's current pact would "simply go too far." The deal would "give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission," he said.

The judge also suggested a way to revise the deal: rather than let copyright owners of books "opt out" of the settlement, copyright owners should be given the choice to "opt in." However Google's lawyers had said in court last year that an "opt-in" structure wouldn't be viable.

Hillary Ware, a managing counsel for Google, on Tuesday said the decision was "clearly disappointing" and the company would consider its options. "Like many others, 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," she said.

Publishers in their turn held out hope that a settlement can still be achieved. They expressed readiness to modify the settlement agreement to gain approval.

Judge Chin's ruling changes little for Google users. About two million books that are in the public domain, such as works of William Shakespeare, currently can be viewed free on the Google Books site. They also are available through Google eBooks, a new online book store that allows people to purchase and read books on different devices.

Google Books users currently can view long previews of another two million books that are in copyright and in print, thanks to agreements between Google and tens of thousands of publishers that were separate from the legal settlement. Millions more books that are in copyright but out of print are currently available in Google Books in a shorter "snippet view." Had the settlement been approved, users would have been able to see longer previews and potentially buy those books.