Both sides of the ongoing Google Books dispute now have until Nov. 9 to prepare a revised settlement for U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin ’75. Chin had previously approved a motion to postpone the date for submitting the revised settlement, from Sept. 24 to Oct. 7.
The lawsuit concerns Google’s right to scan and digitize “orphan books,” out-of-print works whose copyright holders cannot be found or are not available to authorize their digitization. The company provides free access to scanned books through its Google Books service.
In 2007, the Princeton University Library joined the Google Book Search project. Since then, thousands of books in the public domain — those whose copyrights have expired — have been sent to Google to be digitized. The University plans to digitize about a million books over the course of the project's lifetime, University Librarian Karin Trainer said in an e-mail.
Though there have been several delays of the settlement hearing this past year, “the postponement of the Google settlement hearing won’t have any effect on Princeton’s current collaboration with Google, which involves sending them monthly shipments of books in the public domain,” Trainer explained.
The plaintiffs in the suit, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, filed a request on Sept. 22 for additional time to negotiate objections that had been filed against the current settlement by “countries, states, nonprofit organizations and prominent authors and law professors,” Chin said at a brief hearing for the case on Wednesday.
Representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice also noted that the two sides should modify the settlement before it is brought to court so that it respects various legal and antitrust laws, which the current settlement violates.
At present, the settlement fails to offer society ample benefits, and, for this reason, it does not make “sense to conduct a hearing on the fairness and reasonableness of the current settlement agreement,” Chin said, adding, “Clearly, fair concerns have been raised.”
“Should the settlement be approved by the court, Princeton students will eventually have access to the contents of many great libraries, not just their own,” Trainer said. “They can troll through the pages of all of those books, looking for names and subjects pertinent to their research.”
This partnership with Google would also be convenient for students because Google will supply the necessary information for locating works, she added.
“If, after reading the pages online, students choose to borrow the physical books from a library, Google will help them locate copies,” Trainer explained. “Similarly, if they want to buy copies of the books, they can follow links to booksellers.”
Trainer said the project has already begun to benefit not only Princeton students but also the greater academic community.
“The advantage of Google Books … is that it [has democratized] the availability of ideas, facts and opinions,” she explained. “Students from institutions not fortunate enough to have strong library collections, researchers with no formal institutional affiliations and intellectually curious lifelong learners … already have access to more books than they would have dreamed possible five years ago.”
The final hearing of the case is due to take place in late December or early January.
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