Google’s Online Books Overcome Another Hurdle

In a historic deal that will allow Google to put millions of searchable/printable books online, Google will pay $125 million to settle the two outstanding copyright lawsuits originally filed by publishers and authors.

(The cases are The Author’s Guild v. Google Inc., 05cv8136 and the McGraw-Hill Cos. v Google Inc., 05cv8881, both U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan).)

The Google Book project will allow online readers to search for and purchase copyrighted and out-of-print titles, either in their entirety or on a page-by-page basis.  It will also give libraries in the U.S. free access to the materials.

“The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said, calling the accord “historic.”

In 2005, the Author’s Guild, Pearson Plc’s Penguin unit, McGraw-Hill Cos., John Wiley & Sons Inc. and CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster subsidiary sued Google, claiming the process to put the books online infringed their copyrights on a worldwide scale. The project, which started in 2004, includes Harvard University, the New York Public Library and about 10,000 publishers.

“It really opens the door to a whole new way to use copyrighted materials on the internet,” said Terrence Ross, a lawyer at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher in Washington who teaches copyright law at George Mason Law School, but who isn’t involved in the case, and who previously represented clients in trademark suits against Google. “We’re at a time when views of copyright law seem to be in flux; this will remind people it still applies on the Internet.”

The deal, which still is awaiting approval from a Manhattan federal court judge, will ends the suits and give Google users a much larger pool of book-related materials to source from.  Right now, the search engine only provides a few lines of text from any work, but the settlement will allow Google to start providing full pages and offer purchases of complete books based on what rights the authors wish to provide in the future.  Money from the settlement will be used to pay authors whose work was used without earlier permission and help establish controls for any future submissions with the ability to also opt out.

Google is hoping the project will create a new market for books that are no longer in print.

“It’s always been our objective to have more than Web content in the index, especially books,” David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer, said. “Books are authoritative content. It’s higher-quality content, in general, than what’s on the Web and it’s just a fantastic thing to have for users.”

“It’s a direction that Google will have to move towards, pursuing non-advertising ways of monetizing the content they have,” said Mark May, an analyst at Needham & Co. in New York who advises buying Google shares and doesn’t own any. “At some point they’re going to start being a distributor of premium content that can’t be subsidized by advertising alone.”