Google Book Search

Google Book Search is the ambitious plan to digitize every book — famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth — found in the world's libraries, as part of the company's core mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

But in March 2011, a federal judge in New York rejected the company's $125 million class-action settlement with authors and publishers, saying the deal went too far in granting Google rights to exploit books without permission from copyright owners. Given few attractive options, Google may take its battle to Congress, to promote a law that would make orphan works — books that are still under copyright but whose author or copyright owner cannot be found — widely available.

Beginning in 2002 as a "secret books project," according to an official history at the Google site, Google Book Search became a planned multibillion-dollar effort that has had to overcome many obstacles, both the sheer effort of scanning so many pages of text as well as conforming to copyright laws.

In 2004, Google started to team with many of the greatest library collections in the world — the New York Public Library, the University of Michigan, Harvard and Stanford, among others — to digitize their collections, paying the scanning costs. Google said it expected to scan 15 million books from those collections over the next decade.

In October 2008, the company reached a settlement with authors and publishers to end a class-action lawsuit that challenged the legality of the scanning project. Under the agreement, Google offered to pay $125 million and create the framework for a new system that would channel payments from book sales, advertising revenue and other fees to authors and publishers, with Google collecting a cut.

The $125 million would have compensated authors and publishers whose books are still under copyright and help find the copyright holders for so-called "orphan works," out-of-print books still within the law. These copyright holders, considered part of the class that settled with Google, are hard to find, since many never expected their works ever to be in print again. It is the resurrection of these works — making them available at the click of a mouse — that many consider among the greatest benefits of Google Book Search. That, and the millions of public domain works that would be easily searched and called up by computer users around world.

The proposed settlement attracted opposition from various corners of the book world, and the Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation. In September 2009, the Justice Department said the proposed legal settlement between Google and book authors and publishers should not be approved by the court without modifications. In November, Google and groups representing book publishers and authors filed a modified version of their controversial books settlement with a federal court. The changes would have paved the way for other companies to license Google's vast digital collection of copyrighted out-of-print books, and might have resolved Google's conflicts with European governments.

A coalition, the Open Book Alliance, was also formed opposing the proposed class-action settlement. The alliance, which includes nonprofit groups, individuals and library associations, is led by Gary L. Reback, an antitrust lawyer in Silicon Valley, and the Internet Archive, a non-profit group that has been critical of the settlement.  In August 2009, the Google rivals Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo announced plans to join the Open Book Alliance.

"This deal has enormous, far-reaching anticompetitive consequences that people are just beginning to wake up to," said Mr. Reback, a lawyer with Carr & Ferrell, in Palo Alto, Calif. In the 1990s, Mr. Reback helped persuade the Justice Department to file its landmark antitrust case against Microsoft.

European publishers, authors and copyright holders have also objected to the proposed settlement in the American courts. In September 2009, representatives of those groups spoke out at a hearing sponsored by the European Commission against the proposed deal. They said it would give Google too much power, including exclusive rights to sell out-of-print works that remain under copyright, a category that includes millions of books.

Google has tried to mollify European opponents by clarifying that a digitized version of a book considered out of print in the United States, but still commercially available in Europe, would not be sold online without explicit consent from the European copyright holder. The company has also offered European publishers representation on a board to oversee a "book rights registry," which would distribute royalties from digital book sales under the plan proposed by the settlement.

A Judicial Rejection

In 2011, a federal judge delivered a blow to the company’s ambitious plan by rejecting its scope. Judge Denny Chin of United States District Court said the deal went too far in granting Google rights to exploit books without permission from copyright owners. Judge Chin also said that the settlement would give Google a significant advantage over competitors in digital books.

The decision throws Google’s effort to digitize millions of books from libraries into legal limbo and undoes years of painstaking negotiations. The decision is also a setback for the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, which sued Google in 2005 over its digitizing plans and later devised the sweeping settlement that would have helped to bring much of the publishing industry into the digital age.

Despite a series of revisions to the deal made by Google and its partners that were meant to address the most stinging critics, opponents remained steadfast in their rejection of the settlement.