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Google to Pay $125 Million in Settlement Over Book Digitization
The Recorder
October 29, 2008
Google will pay $125 million to authors and publishers to settle a high-profile copyright infringement dispute over the search engine's efforts to put books online.
Reached after three years of legal wrangling, the settlement is a business deal that will allow Google to go ahead with its project of digitizing millions of books.
"Obviously we think the settlement is great and will provide a really exciting new platform for making content available to users," said Daralyn Durie, a partner with San Francisco's Keker & Van Nest who represented Google in the settlement talks.
Authors and publishers will get 63 percent of revenue generated by Google's electronic book database from the sale of online books and advertising. As part of the $125 million, Google will pay $34.5 million to set up the Book Rights Registry, which will collect the money and give it to the copyright owners. Another $45 million will go to authors and publishers that had their books uploaded without permission. Plaintiffs lawyers will take home $30 million.
Settlement talks got under way two years ago after Google was sued by the Authors Guild and a group of publishers for copyright infringement when it began scanning books for its database. Lawyers involved in the case say the reason for the protracted talks was that Google, the authors, the publishers and libraries had to come to an agreement.
"There were four disparate groups with four disparate interests that had to come together," said Michael Boni, of Pennsylvania-based Boni & Zack, which represented the authors in the lawsuit.
The publishers were represented by Debevoise & Plimpton's Jeffrey Cunard, managing partner of the firm's Washington, D.C., office.
Google switched its lawyers once it became clear that the case was headed for settlement and not for trial. When it was in litigation, the search engine had turned to Joseph Beck of Kilpatrick Stockton in Atlanta. When it came time to settle, Google relied on its in-house lawyers, licensing partner Suzanne Bell from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and the Keker lawyers.
Beck did not return a call Tuesday, and Google did not return an e-mail seeking comment. Keker's Durie also declined to comment on the switch.
Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin partner Ronald Star represented the libraries, which are involved in a number of ways, including providing the books to be scanned by Google.
Observers differed on who got the best deal: Google or the copyright holders.
Cydney Tune, a copyright lawyer at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman in San Francisco, said she thought Google came out a winner.
"While $125 million isn't chump change, it's not a large amount of money if you think about the potential liability arising from every work being digitized," Tune said.
Over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, staff attorney Corynne McSherry said the dispute would have made for good law on fair use if it had gone to trial. Google had been arguing that posting snippets of the books it copied into digital format was fair use.
McSherry said that the settlement, if it works out well, could provide some guidance in the other big copyright disputes, like the one between Viacom and YouTube, another Google property.
"One thing it might suggest to them is that maybe it's better to see how you can make some money from this crazy Internet thing than just fighting it," she said.
Lawyers worked long hours on the agreement, negotiating complex issues such as who really owns the copyrights and simple disputes over the definition of a book. In all, they produced more than 300 pages of settlement documents, which will go to a New York federal judge for approval.
So will the book-like agreement get uploaded by Google onto its database? That depends on whether it meets the definition in the agreement, the lawyers said.
