Google Books Settlement Agreement

The biggest aspect of the monopoly/anti-trust issues with Google Books, is the Google Books Settlement agreement. It is an agreement between the Authors Guild, the association of American Publishers and Google in a settlement from Authors Guild et al. v Google (a class action lawsuit about copyright infringement). The agreement has yet to be approved but parts of the agreement hold that Google pay $125 million dollars. The settlement also includes provisions that allow Google to sell personal and institutional subscriptions to its database of books. It also has in it an agreement for partnership for future book digitization.

This aspect is why the agreement settlement has not moved forward. Google Books seems to be teetering on anti-trust laws and could easily have a monopoly on all future book digitization projects.

The Department of Justice have said about the new settlement

“Google would remain the only competitor in the digital marketplace with the rights to distribute and otherwise exploit a vast array of works in multiple formats. Google also would have the exclusive ability to exploit unclaimed works (including so-called “orphan works”) without risk of liability.”

So in this settlement, Google would be the only ones who would be able to reproduce the orphan works, or those books under copyright whose owners cannot be found, without the fear of being sued for copyright infringement. If any other publisher did this, they could face fines ranging from $750 to $150,000 per infringement.

The DOJ have also said that the revised settlement (an earlier version of the settlement was rejected)  “suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class-action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation.”

If the settlement is approved, many experts agree that this is not an end to Google’s legal issues and that issues on copyright and anti-trust are still relevant to the book digitization process.