As we noted yesterday, the settlement between the American Association of Publishers, the Authors Guild and Google shows that creators' rights and consumer benefit can go hand-in-hand in the Internet age. It's a victory for consumers and creators alike.
The agreement demonstrates that collaboration between the technology community and the creative community can give consumers access to a wealth of resources while also preserving copyright owners right to control how their work is distributed online and to earn fair compensation for their creativity.
In addition, the agreed payment by Google of at least $45 million to authors whose works were copied without their permission makes clear that the appropriation of copyright holders' works without their permission or any consideration of compensation to the creator should have costly consequences. As this settlement makes clear, copyright holders must approve the use of their works before they can be copied or distributed.
UCLA law professor Doug Lichtman told Arts+Labs yesterday afternoon:
The settlement announced today is a win all around. For content creators, the settlement makes clear that copyright rights continue to have vitality even in the digital age. Google's disregard for copyright, which was the basis for the original project and their stance in the now-settled litigation, has been fully and rightly repudiated. For technologists, meanwhile, the settlement shows that the content and technology communities can work together to create new and frankly amazing opportunities. We are not there yet, but today the world took a huge step toward a searchable, online, comprehensive Library of Alexandria. The only damper to today's celebration? The worry that Google just created for itself yet another functional monopoly.
Georgetown University professor Paul Rothstein also weighed in with us yesterday...
The digital age presents unprecedented opportunities for the dissemination of creative works in the arts, literature, and the like, among a remarkably wide audience-- to the immeasurable benefit of man- and womankind. But eventually there will be no creative works to disseminate if those responsible for producing them are not fairly compensated. This settlement is a step in the right direction towards making works widely available to the general public yet at the same time providing fair compensation that will encourage creative production. Hopefully it will inspire other efforts to achieve this kind of accommodation.
We're collecting more interesting commentary and reaction below. The sentiment is clear - disregard for the rights of artists and content creators can't be tolerated. . .even in a digital environment.
Voluntary arrangements like this, where copyright owners have flexibility, are far superior, and frankly can't be compared to a compulsory model. Here the rightsholder still can largely determine his or her own fate. I hope this system works as anticipated, and can be a model for future litigation involving massive infringement of creators' rights, noting that rightsholders have every right to push litigation to a court verdict if they feel that is the bestapproach.
At first glance, this appears to be the rare settlement agreement that seemingly benefits all parties.
A TechDirt commenter, responding to Mike Masnick's pessimism (via Broadstuff):
For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and even though it's contrary to Mike's ardent desire that such content be "freed," this is not a bad agreement at all. Quite the opposite. Now, I've only scanned through the actual text of the agreement, but it actually provides for far greater use of scanned books than Google might have been able to do if it just asserted its right of fair use.
[...] Cooperation between the publishers/authors, libraries, and Google will mean more books will be available for the service (and I'd anticipate a scenario where all newly published books are digitally sent to Google for the project automatically upon publication). All because Google had the foresight to realize that publishers and authors have rights too, and that if reasonably addressed (and this is really quite a reasonable agreement), new cooperative models can actually be put into practice.
Business Week Tech Beat's Rob Hof:
As a book lover, what I find the coolest thing about the deal is that eventually, I'll be able to visit most any library and, using at least one terminal that will be set up at each library, view digital versions of these books for free (though I'll have to pay to print out pages). It's nice that all the sides managed to agree on something that is demonstrably a good thing for all of us.
The press releases characterizes the agreement as a "win for everyone." In this case that's probably accurate. I may be overreaching in saying this, but this settlement may also represent a framework for online distribution of other digital content from the TV, film and/or music industries.
Once this settlement is agreed on, we will have what sounds like a reasonable program for working within the bounds of copyright.
All the parties, while mentioning their own vested interests that were served by the agreement, rightly tipped a hat to the big winners: readers, who might otherwise not be able to access some of this material. ... Details are a bit sparse on some implementation aspects right now, but it's hard to find fault with the spirit of the agreement.
Chris Snyder, at Wired's Epicenter blog:
Regardless of who benefits more as a business, this certainly a big win for readers.
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