14 DAY TRIAL // There's been a lot of debate over the ongoing Google Books litigation and the proposed settlement currently under review. Google made itself heard, detractors made themselves heard, even the US Department of Justice made its point across. One party deeply involved in the process had stayed quite for the most part though, the Authors Guild. The group is now coming out with a message to its members and the world, justifying its support for the current settlement and it makes for an interesting read.
The group says that settling with Google and establishing a legal outlet for selling books, either in-print or orphaned titles, was the best way to move forwards. First and foremost, it says that copyright law is a very touchy issue and a complex subject. It still holds its initial claims that Google scanning and displaying 'snippets' of copyrighted books wasn't fair use, the provision in US copyright law which allows copyrighted works to be used by anyone in certain circumstances, but says the court might have seen it otherwise.
It says that, had it lost, it wouldn't have had any say in how people used copyrighted books to the detriment of the authors. The settlement enables authors to take control over how their works are distributed online. However, even if the lawsuit was one, the Authors Guild believed that it would have been worthless. While the law may have been on its side and Google would have stopped scanning, others may have picked up from there regardless of what the court decided.
"[C]opyright victories tend to be Pyrrhic in the digital age. Our settlement negotiations went on with full knowledge of what happened to the music industry. The RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) won victory after victory, defeating Napster and Grokster with ground-breaking legal rulings. The RIAA also went after countless individuals, chasing down infringement wherever they could track it down," the Guild wrote. "It didn't work. The infringement just moved elsewhere, in unpredictable ways."