Chin '75 gives authors four months to opt out of Google settlement

The settlement focuses on the question of whether Google can disseminate “orphan works,” books that are still under copyright but are currently out of print or whose authors can not be located.

When the Book Search is completed, users will be allowed to view the first 20 percent of a book for free and pay a fee to access the entire book. Users will have free access to the entirety of out-of-print books that are non-copyrighted.

Google also plans to create a subscription option for institutions such as Princeton University and other colleges. The school’s purchase of a license would allow its students and faculty free access to all the books available via Google Books. Additionally, a computer kiosk on the subscribing campus with free access to all Google Books would be made available to the public and alumni.

“Assuming that the language in the licensing agreement and the price are fair, we will certainly subscribe to the Google file as soon as it becomes available,” University Librarian Karin Trainer said.

“Princeton students and faculty have always been extraordinarily research-oriented, and they already borrow an unusually large number of books from our campus libraries and request far more titles through BorrowDirect than other universities request from us,” she added. “Having such easy access to more titles through the Google project will make it possible for students and faculty to dig into their topics even more deeply.”

Alexander Macgillivray ’95, Google’s senior product and intellectual property counsel, said he was confident the Google Books Search would benefit institutions like Princeton.

“When I was at Princeton, I went to the library ... and would come out ... with 100 books that were maybe useful,” he explained. “I had to cast a wide net to figure out what would be useful. The 20 percent preview from the settlement would let you figure out beforehand if a book was useful and let you go to the library for the two [useful] books.”

In February 2007, the University Library signed a six-year contract with Google to make the full text of about one million books from its library available online through the Google Book Search. Princeton has already been sending books to Google to be scanned and will fully support the initiative for digitizing books.

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“Our agreement with Google calls for them to digitize about 1,000,000 books no longer covered by copyright. We’ve been sending them a shipment of books every month for a little more than a year so far,” Trainer said.

Google’s development of Book Search has been hindered, however, by the copyright laws governing distribution of printed materials.

“There is currently no central listing of copyright laws,” Google spokeswoman Jennie Johnson said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. “Copyright laws are complicated and have changed a lot. So there is no central listing of authors and publishers and heirs, so this settlement involved a complicated notice campaign.”

The settlement decided by Chin had actually been pushed back to October 2008 because Google “wanted to make sure all [involved] have chance to understand the settlement,” Johnson said, adding that the delay does not involve any modifications to the terms of the settlement. It simply gives authors, publishers and rights holders enough time to decide “to opt out or opt in,” she explained.

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Trainer said she believes the effects of the Google Book Search will continue to expand.

“I think the number of people reading e-books will continue to grow as the number of titles available grows and the hand-held reading devices become more comfortable to use,” she said. “For the next decade, though, I predict the number of printed books read will continue to outpace e-books.”

Johnson said the project will greatly expand the availability of books and serve to benefit the greater global community.

Many authors, publishers and readers often think in terms of physical books, “but we see [the] benefit of expanding access for users and to organize world information,” she explained. “Our mission is to make info more accessible to people,” she added. “We really need to be making sure that we are digitizing books and making them discoverable.”

Trainer noted that there is a potential danger of Google initially holding a monopoly on this industry.

“The disadvantage is that, at least in the short run, a single company will have control of the file of all of those books,” she explained.

But, in the long run, Johnson said, she expects Google will have competition in this arena.

“The [settlement] deal is structured to encourage competition, which is what has been going on already,” she said. “This access is incredibly powerful. We are continuing to scan these books. This is very important to the public, students and book lovers.”

Macgillivray added, “There is nothing exclusive about this deal at all, nothing to stop others from doing exactly what we did ... [and] we’d be happy with that.”