Intellectual property arguments are almost always clusterf*cks. Witness the whole argument over SOPA as an example. But rarely do they get more clusterf*ck-y than this.
Google and the various parties involved with the creation of books — namely publishers, authors and people of that ilk — actually came to a settlement four years ago that would allow Google to do what it wants, namely dump every book it can find into a scanner and let people search them on the web.
For various reasons, this annoyed enough people involved in the creation of books that the judge who originally singed off on the settlement reversed his decision, so now it’s back in court. Google is, of course, playing hardball.
Reports Ars Technica:
James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at New York Law School, told Ars that the publishers are likely to settle their lawsuit. “The publishers are willing to settle on terms that Google thinks are pretty easy to live with,” he said. The publishers are primarily interested in maximizing revenue, and so they’re strongly motivated to find a way to let Google digitize their books in exchange for a cut of the revenue. Grimmelmann said there have been rumors of an imminent settlement in the publishers’ case for months.
But Google is likely to carry on its battle with the authors, photographers, and other individual copyright holders. Some authors consider the fight a matter of principle. And even if Google convinced the individual named authors to settle their lawsuit, that wouldn’t prevent other authors from filing lawsuits in the future. So Google may have little choice but to seek a ruling from the courts that its scanning project is legal under copyright’s fair use doctrine.
Like we said, clusterf*ck-y.