Google Settles With Authors, Publishers; Will Pay $125M

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on October 28, 2008 - 7:59am.

New York - Google (NASD: GOOG) on Tuesday announced a landmark settlement agreement with authors and publishers over its mammoth book-scanning project, which calls for the company to make payments totaling $125 million, and will grant Google significantly expanded access to published works. Reached after two years of negotiations, the agreement will resolve both a class action copyright lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, and a separate lawsuit filed by five large publisher members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

Under the terms, Google Book Search will gain access to millions of additional in-copyright works, while Google will help create a not-for-profit Book Rights Registry to distribute payments earned from online access to published works.

The Book Rights Registry will additionally "locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project."

Google Book Search will also create additional ways to purchase copyrighted books; offer institutional subscriptions for U.S. colleges and other organizations; and provide free access from U.S. libraries.

"From our perspective, the agreement creates an innovative framework for the use of copyrighted material in a rapidly digitizing world, serves readers by enabling broader access to a huge trove of hard-to-find books, and benefits the publishing community by establishing an attractive commercial model that offers both control and choice to the rightsholder," said Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American Publishers.

Libraries at the Universities of California, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Stanford provided input into the settlement, and are expected to now participate in the project, joining existing participants such as the New York Public Library and Harvard.