Google Books case stalls

While little progress has been made in the Google digital books case, which was adjudicated by U.S. Circuit Court Judge Denny Chin ’75, Chin proposed a schedule for the trial against Google last week, setting the case to go to court next year.

The case opened in 2005, when The Authors Guild and The Association of American Publishers separately sued Google for violation of copyright law after the company proposed a massive digitization project that would scan and make available online a number of works with lapsed copyrights.

The case has been making slow progress in recent years, with Chin rejecting a proposed $125 million settlement among the three parties in March, acknowledging that the trial would probably take at least one more year.

Meanwhile, Google has been moving ahead on its Google Book Search project, scanning more than 15 million books since 2004.

The complete plan includes a six-year agreement between the University library and Google, signed in 2007, to make about one million public domain texts from the library collection available online.

The agreement will remain unaffected by the pending lawsuit, University spokesperson Martin Mbugua said, though the total number of works made available online will likely be lower than one million due to the condition of the books and the exclusion of works already digitized by other libraries.

The digital copies of University books will be searchable and the full text of the books will be available for viewing and downloading, University Librarian Karin Trainer said in the original University announcement of the agreement with Google.

While the University has not yet been implicated in the case, other universities that partnered with Google have faced difficulties. The Authors Guild; equivalent organizations in Australia, Canada and the U.K.; and a large group of other authors filed a lawsuit against a partnership between Google and the universities of Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Cornell University and the University of California last Monday.

The five universities had partnered with Google to digitize their books to make books accessible to more students. The Authors Guild claimed that the scanned works violated copyright.

The settlement that Chin rejected earlier this year would have allowed Google to make the full texts of books registered with the U.S. copyright office or published in the U.K., Australia or Canada available online.

At the time of the settlement decision, Chin encouraged the parties involved to propose a revised settlement that would still compile a digital database of texts while revising certain issues like the “de facto monopoly” Google would hold over unclaimed works and the fact that copyright owners had to choose to opt out rather than opt in to be included in the project.

Since then, it has been unclear whether the parties involved have come any closer to settlement and whether the full digital database of scanned texts will become accessible anytime soon.