Google, Guild Settle Suit

After three years of court battles, the lawsuit between Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers has reached a settlement. In 2005, Google was all set to scan and post on the Internet significant portions of the University of Michigan library's content, including books that were still protected under copyright law. The Authors Guild and the American Publishers Association sued to stop the project, or at least compensate the writers that still owned the copyright to their works. Now, all parties have agreed to a settlement, in which Google will pay out $125 million, most of which will go into a fund to compensate authors.

Here, courtesy of a Guild member, is Authors Guild President Roy Blount Jr.'s statement:

A message from Roy Blount Jr.:

A couple months after I became Authors Guild president in 2006, we met with Google to propose a settlement to our class-action lawsuit. The Guild had sued Google in September 2005, after Google struck deals with major university libraries to scan and copy millions of books in their collections. Many of these were older books in the public domain, but millions of others were still under copyright protection. Nick Taylor, then the president of the Guild, saw Google's scanning as "a plain and brazen violation of copyright law." Google countered that its digitizing of these books represented a "fair use" of the material. Our position was: The hell you say. Of such disagreements, lawsuits are made.

Our proposal to Google back in May 2006 was simple: while we don't approve of your unauthorized scanning of our books and displaying snippets for profit, if you're willing to do something far more ambitious and useful, and you're willing to cut authors in for their fair share, then it would be our pleasure to work with you.

We're happy to report that our proposal found a receptive audience at Google and at Association of American Publishers and the several publishing houses that had filed a separate lawsuit in October 2005 against Google. Reaching final agreement turned out to be not so simple, but today, after nearly two and a half years of negotiations, we're joining with Google and the AAP and those publishers to announce the settlement of Authors Guild v. Google.