A revised version was filed late Friday night of the proposed settlement of the Author's Guild and Association of American Publishers class-action copyright lawsuit against Google for its Book Search product -- and in particular for the book contents scanned by Google from the collections of major participating research libraries into the "Google Library Project." It is unclear whether the revisions to the settlement, originally proposed in October 2008, will satisfy the Department of Justice's anti-trust concerns or the concerns of the other objectors. Library representatives have, of course, been among those most involved in monitoring the lawsuit, and the consequences to the electronic book marketplace likely to result from its settlement. The
official settlement administration website includes the text of the agreement and the forms for rights-holders to claim works covered by the settlement agreement.
The Public Index (
thepublicindex.org)is a project of
James Grimmelmann, of the NYU Law School's
Institute for Information Law and Policy, that gathers a 'reading room' of lawsuit documents. The site also has a useful
redline mark-up of the amended settlement that allows monitoring of the changes since the initial settlement proposed last year, and a
'news timeline' linking selected news stories about the Google project, the lawsuit, and the settlement - from December 2003 to the present. The site also has a collaboratively annotated version of the settlement document, although it has seen a rather low level of participation.
Law Librarian Blog links additional resources.
Library Journal has a write-up post-revision and notes that the DOJ concerns about Google's treatment of orphan works may be unresolved by the amendments.
Andrew Plumb-Larrick