Google redrafts book deal to appease regulators

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 16 Nov 2009 at 09:05

Google has redrafted its deal with the Authors Guild, as it looks to defuse antitrust and copyright concerns.

Google's plan to put millions of books online has been praised for expanding access to the texts, but has also been extensively criticised on antitrust, copyright and privacy grounds by regulators and rivals.

According to a 30-page court filing made by the parties late on Friday, a section was eliminated that required the book registry created by the settlement to give Google at least as good a deal as any competitor.

In another shift, money from unclaimed or orphan works will go to an independent fiduciary rather than the registry.

We've had numerous discussions and quite a lot of dialogue with the Justice Department and feel we've addressed their key concerns

The Justice Department, in September, had pointed to that arrangement as a conflict of interest since it was the registry that was also tasked with locating writers and paying them for their online sales.

Under the new deal, unclaimed funds will eventually go to charities.

The class action agreement must be approved by a court, and the Justice Department had recommended that the previous version be rejected because of concerns that it might break antitrust law. It also had concerns about violations of copyright law.

"We've had numerous discussions and quite a lot of dialogue with the Justice Department and feel we've addressed their key concerns," says Richard Sarnoff, president of Bertelsmann Digital Media.

The agreement is designed to settle a 2005 class action lawsuit filed against Google by authors and publishers who had accused the search engine giant of copyright infringement for scanning libraries full of books.

International objections

As part of the amended deal, books in the registry will be reduced to those copyrighted in the US or published in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

There had been significant international objection to the deal on the grounds that non-English speaking authors, in particular, were represented by the authors and publishers who sued Google but had no say in negotiating the deal.

German book publishers have been up in arms about the deal, and on 24 September they criticised European regulators for failing to take a stand against the settlement.

The French publishing house La Martiniere, the French Publishers' Association and authors' group SGDL asked a Paris court to fine Google for infringement for digitising their books.

On 22 October, a group representing authors in China accused Google of copyright infringement.