Google Books Settlement Delayed Indefinitely
As currently written, the controversial settlement between Google and groups representing publishers and authors is officially dead. On Thursday, a federal judge gave the parties time to negotiate a new deal that would address some of the many objections filed by various groups.
Context & Ripple Effects
The settlement has been losing allies for months: Harvard backed out of the book-scanning deal in November 2008 over its terms (Harvard's exit from the scanning agreement was an early signal that the academic world would not simply accept whatever the Authors Guild and publishers signed), and by last week objections from libraries, foreign rights holders and consumer groups were numerous enough that the parties themselves requested more time. On September 22 they formally sought a hearing delay with a revised deal said to be brewing (the parties' own request for extra negotiation time), and Google confirmed on September 20 that it was working on revisions.
Thursday's decision by the federal judge makes the delay official and indefinite: the settlement is dead as currently written, and the parties are told to go back and negotiate something that answers the filed objections. That Bloomberg's pickup frames the same saga through a legal challenge in France underscores how far beyond US courtroom politics the backlash now runs.
First-order effects
- Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers lose their approved path to monetizing and distributing millions of scanned out-of-print books; the court's clock stops until they produce a rewritten deal that satisfies the objection filers.
- The renegotiation hands the settlement's critics — libraries, foreign publisher groups, and academics like those who pushed Harvard out — direct leverage over the terms of any replacement agreement.
Second-order effects
- Rival digitization efforts and library coalitions gain room to press for structural changes in the rewrite, such as open-access provisions for orphan works, since the judge has effectively endorsed their objections by refusing to bless the original terms.
- Foreign rights holders, emboldened by both the delay and the parallel legal challenges surfacing internationally, become a constituency Google cannot negotiate around if it wants the scanned-library business to operate across borders.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, court scrutiny becomes the gatekeeper for private class-action settlements over mass digitization: no single company gets to define the licensing rules for an entire cultural archive through one negotiated contract.
- The episode points toward orphan works and cross-border digital library rights being resolved through policy or legislation rather than corporate settlements, because the objections keep coming from constituencies no two-party deal can represent.
The trend: Courtroom arbitration is replacing private settlement as the deciding mechanism for who controls mass-digitized book archives, with Google Books the defining test case.