Google Book Search

Google has settled its copyright dispute with the Author's Guild and Association of American Publishers for $US125 million. The settlement in the case - which challenged Google's Book Search program - will "establish an independent, non-profit Book Rights Registry, to resolve outstanding claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees from class-action lawsuits against Google." More crucially, it also sets the scene for the publishing industry to enter the 21st century, with royalties from digital viewing of books:

The agreement, which only applies to holders of US copyrights, allows users of Google Book Search to preview a limited number of pages of in copyright books for free if the rightsholder agrees. Consumers can choose to buy an entire book online at a price to be set by the rightsholder or a Google algorithm designed to "maximise revenues for the book".  read more »

Google's Book Search program is now offering a very handy free database for publishers - one which lists books for which the copyright was not renewed between 1923 and 1963 (thus putting them in the public domain):

For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain...The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly typed in every word.

Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.

There are undoubtedly errors in these records, but we believe this is the best and most comprehensive set of renewal records available today. These records are free and in the public domain, and we hope you're able to use them to determine the copyright status of books that interest you.  read more »

The Guardian has a long and fascinating opinion piece by author John Lanchester on copyright in the Google Age. Lanchester surveys the history of copyright, the influence of corporations in modern copyright law, and how Google Booksearch is changing how we think about ownership of book content:

The corporations have the power, and they are not afraid to use it. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US considerably extended the range of both criminal and civil offences that could be committed over copyright issues. There is a clause in US film contracts which awards the producers rights "in perpetuity and throughout the universe and for any and all forms of expression whether now existing or hereafter devised". As far as I can tell, the only loophole in that is if you fell through a crack in the space-time fabric of the universe into a parallel one...

...There is an irony here. Twenty years ago, the US studios announced that the end of civilisation as we know it was at hand; the destructive force was the video-cassette recorder. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, went before Congress and said that "The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone." Today, revenue from video rentals accounts for 46.6% of all the money earned by the major studios.  read more »

In mid-January Google hosted "Unbound" at the New York Public Library, which featured a number of high-profile speakers on the cutting edge of publishing, all who were basically aligned (though not completely) with Google's efforts to change the face of book publishing.

At "Unbound," the tech-savvy authors, publishers and analysts more or less agreed that to grow and profit in an increasingly digital world, the publishing industry will have to expand its boundaries.

"We're in a period of tremendous change, and have to embrace that change," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of technical manual publishing company O'Reilly Media. "We as publishers have to become part of the new digital ecosystem that Google is working so hard to build."

Part of the focus of the event was to help convince publishers to ink deals with Google on their 'Book Search' program, which has been under fire from many publishers for infringing on author (and publisher) copyrights.