Legal News

In Google Books Suit, Parties Mulling the DOJ?s Objections

By Ashby Jones

Monday is the first day of fall. But no fear, we already have a guess as to what the legal theme of the upcoming season might be: the scrutinized and/or rejected settlement.

Of course, we’ve written a lot about the rejected settlement in the Bank of America/SEC matter, but another big settlement is getting an exceedingly close look prior to a hearing before New York federal judge Denny Chin on Oct. 7.

That settlement, which we’ve also written a bit about before (here and here), involves Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Over the weekend, the parties said they were hashing out what changes they are willing to make to the agreement following the Justice Department’s objections, formally articulated on Friday.

The authors and publishers sued the search-engine giant in 2005, claiming the company's Google Books project - an effort to digitize huge volumes of books and ultimately make them publicly availalble - violated their copyrights.

The parties then spent two years negotiating a sweeping digital-books settlement. Late last week, the Justice Department proposed several changes to the agreement. Click here for the WSJ story; here for the NYT story. Click here for further commentary, from the AmLaw Litigation Daily.

In its filing, the Justice Department echoed concerns that others have recently raised about the settlement. Some had criticized the settlement as inconsistent with copyright law while others said it could allow publishers to charge higher prices for their works.

The Justice Department also proposed some specific potential remedies. For example, it said concerns the agreement could give Google broad license to use digital works in unspecified ways could be resolved by limiting those rights in the agreement.

According to the WSJ story, by reporters Jessica Vascellaro and Jeff Trachtenberg, the authors and publishers groups expressed confidence that the legal concerns raised by the Justice Department will be addressed successfully through negotiations.

Under the settlement, Google would have the rights to use digital copies of the works scanned in as part of digital book and search services in exchange for sharing revenue with the rightsholders through a registry that would oversee the agreement.

“Justice has issues, but those issues can absolutely be resolved,” said John Sargent, a leading negotiator on behalf of the Association of American Publishers. “The memo stated in clear language that the United States of America wants this settlement to go through.”

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said the Justice Department has “provided what they see as a road map to getting the deal done.”

The DOJ also asked the parties to look for ways to address how parts of the agreement pit known rightsholders against unknown rightsholders, whose works are commonly known as “orphan works.” The Justice Department also raised questions about whether foreign authors are adequately represented.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 21, 2009 (boomark / email).