30/11/09

An amended settlement agreement was filed by the American Association of Publishers, the Authors Guild and Google on 13 November in New York in an effort to end litigation brought by the publishers and authors against Google over its library scanning program. The biggest change in the agreement deals with international works. The agreement is now limited to books that were either registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the United Kingdom, Australia or Canada. The parties said that after feedback from foreign rightsholders they decided to narrow the class to include only countries “which share a common legal heritage and similar book industry practices” with the U.S. Authors in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom have class representatives in the Settlement. The Australian class representative is Rob Pullan, Chair of the ASA.

In a change pertaining to unclaimed works, the revised agreement still calls for the Book Rights Registry (BRR) to search for rightsholders and hold revenue for five years. A portion of the revenue generated by unclaimed works may now also be used to locate rightsholders and will not become part of the BRR’s general operating fund.

The amended agreement makes some changes to the access models to the database of scanned works. While keeping the primary access models the same, future access models have been limited to print-on-demand, file download and subscription. The BRR will also be able to increase the number of terminals at a public library building. Google will also continue to allow other retailers to sell online access to the books covered in the settlement, a revision it announced in September. The overall financial terms of the agreement have not been changed with rightsholders receiving 63% of revenue generated from their works and Google 37%.

The parties said that after reviewing submissions filed with the Court, including those from the United States Justice Department, changes made to the settlement “were developed to address many of these concerns, while preserving the core benefits of the agreement”. The Final Fairness hearing is now expected to be held in early 2010 and a timeline for submissions will be issued shortly.

The ASA supports the amended settlement which will provide income opportunities for authors with out-of-print books.