IDG News Service —
By settling a lawsuit with book authors and publishers this week, Google is looking out for itself and has avoided fighting for and possibly establishing a positive legal precedent for copyright fair use on the Internet.
Google, which paints itself as a warrior in Internet regulatory and legal challenges, apparently prioritized self-interest by settling copyright infringement lawsuits over its book search engine.
Google's defense against the two book industry lawsuits rested mostly on the fair use exceptions in the U.S. copyright law, which allow for certain limited uses of material without permission from rights holders.
According to some copyright experts, Google stood a good chance to win in court, an outcome that would have contributed greatly to clarifying fair use applications in the age of digital online distribution.
In that way, Google, with its considerable financial and legal resources, could have blazed a trail on behalf of many, less wealthy Internet companies. Instead, the proposed settlement, which requires court approval, sends the message that digitizing and delivering book content online is an expensive, complicated business.
Google will pay US$125 million as part of the settlement, on top of the considerable investments in book search technology and operation it has made since creating that service, launched in 2004.
In exchange, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers will drop their lawsuits, allowing Google to considerably expand the size and appeal of its Book Search service. The lawsuits accused Google of massive copyright violation for not seeking permission from rights owners to scan and index their books as part of Google's program to digitize university book collections.
In its defense, Google said that its actions qualified as fair use exceptions because, for in-copyright books scanned without permission, it only shows snippets of texts that match a search query.
Having a strong component of book content in its search index is a big boon for Google that will allow it to further cement its dominant position as the world's preferred engine.
"As an academic and a fair use advocate, I was somewhat disappointed the case got settled. I had been hoping to see it as a test of the boundaries of fair use, as a chance for the court to describe more specifically the scope of fair use here," said Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Seltzer, currently a visiting professor at American University's Washington College of Law, believes that most of what Google has been doing in its library scanning program is protected by fair use.
