It was a glittering dream: A vast worldwide digital library, tens of millions of books all in one easily accessible place . . . named Google.
Now that dream has been denied, and soon dreamers will meet to see whether they can fashion a more workable vision - one that will pass legal muster.
In a Manhattan court March 22, U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin struck down an agreement among search engine Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers. The pact would have let Google sell access to its ever-growing database of more than 15 million digitized books. But no. The decision, a pivotal moment in the history of electronic books and libraries, stands firm on traditional notions of copyright, monopolies, and privacy. With the agreement rejected, all sides will huddle April 25 to see whether there's a next step.
"I'd love to be a fly on the wall at that meeting," says Corynne McSherry, intellectual-property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an objection in the case along with the American Civil Liberties Union.
"I don't know how they're going to work it out," says Ken Auletta, author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.
It's been a twisty-turny journey. In 2002, Google began scanning books into its database. In 2004, it launched Google Search (later renamed Google Books), by which users could view snippets and download, for a fee, public-domain books (those to which no one holds a copyright). Google partnered with places such as Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, and Oxford Universities and began to digitize their holdings.
But many of those books were under copyright, prompting the Authors Guild and the Publishers Association to sue in 2005.
A settlement was reached in 2008. Tellingly, Google agreed to pay $125 million to search for copyright holders and pay authors and publishers fees and royalties. Auletta says, "They were, in effect, acknowledging there's such a thing as copyright. That's a huge admission for a digital company to make."
But in 2009, the U.S. Department of Justice, worried about giving big Google a monopoly, balked. The agreement was amended, and last year it reached Chin's desk. The digital world had been waiting for the outcome.
