Google Book Search Reaches a Settlement with Authors
posted by admin on October 28th, 2008
Good news for all you book lovers out there. Google has reached a settlement in a lawsuit over Book Search, Google’s search engine of scanned books:
Google will establish a non-profit Book Rights Registry to ensure copyrighted works receive compensation via subscription services or ad revenue.
The registry and settlements will cost Google $125m (£80m).
However, the deal still needs approval from a US district court to resolve the pending lawsuits.
If approved, the agreement will provide much wider access to out-of-print books and a great many in-print, in-copyright works.
‘Good sense’
The scheme will also set up subscription services for institutions such as universities to have full access to the online collections of libraries worldwide, with free access provided at US public and university libraries.
A number of American university libraries have participated in brokering the deal, and it is widely expected that more libraries will soon join the effort.
Web users will be able to establish an “online bookshelf” with the opportunity to buy lifetime rights to read and print scanned books searched through Google.
Hopefully this will make it even easier to find the world’s information through Google. If it helps writers earn a living from their work, that’s good too. We just hope it’s not something Google did for short term profit at the expense of future innovation, as Mike Masnick suggests in this thoughtful post.
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March 15th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Great post, thanks for the info