Abstract
For the past four years, Google has been systematically making digital copies of books in the collections of many major university libraries. It made the digital copies searchable through its web site - you couldn't read the books, but you could at least find out where the phrase you're looking for appears within them. This outraged copyright owners, who filed a class action lawsuit to make Google stop. Then, last fall, the parties to this large class action announced an even larger settlement: one that would give Google a license not only to scan books, but also to sell them. The settlement tackles the orphan works problem, but through the judicial process. Laundering orphan works legislation through a class action lawsuit is both a brilliant response to legislative inaction and a dangerous use of the judicial power. Many of the public interest safeguards that would have been present in the political arena are attenuated in a seemingly private lawsuit; the lack of such safeguards is evident in the terms of the resulting settlement. The solution is to reinsert these missing public interest protections into the settlement.
Highlights
For the past four years, Google has been systematically making digital copies of books in the collections of many major university libraries
With orphan works legislation stalled out, the class action settlement may well be the only way of accomplishing this goal
The narrowness of the focus on absent class members, in a case with such profound effects on the public interest in copyright, ought to be a signal that something is seriously wrong with using a class action settlement to bring orphan works legislation into being
Summary
For the past four years, Google has been systematically making digital copies of books in the collections of many major university libraries. It made the digital copies searchable through its web site—you couldn’t read the books, but you could at least find out where the phrase you’re looking for appears within them This outraged copyright owners, who filed a class action lawsuit to make Google stop. Part I of the Issue Brief is an analysis of the lawsuit and its settlement It discusses Google’s original scanning project and the copyright-infringement lawsuit the authors and publishers filed to stop the scanning. The Project “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”[1] Building on its wildly successful web search engine, Google has expanded into searching news stories, blogs, images, videos, and other media When it started thinking about books, Google worked with publishers through a Partner Program: the publishers supplied it with digital copies of books, and Google made the copies searchable. Google Book Search set itself apart from other similar programs like Amazon’s “search inside the book,” which provides snippets and previews, but which is strictly opt-in for authors, publishers, and other copyright owners
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