Explaining the Google Books Case Saga

A federal court yesterday rejected a settlement between Google, authors and publishers, throwing into doubt the search company's plans to make every book ever published searchable online.

Acknowledging in his opinion that “the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many,” federal district court judge Denny Chin ultimately decided that the proposed agreement was “not fair, adequate and reasonable.”

Origins of the Google Books Case

This is the latest twist in a six-year legal saga that began when Google announced in 2004 that it was partnering with several research universities around the world to scan their entire library collections. Google would then make the digitized copies available for search online. To date Google has scanned over 12 million books.

Scanning a book means copying it, and copying a book without permission from the publisher or author is a violation of copyright. Soon after the announcement, publisher and author groups began protesting Google's ambitious plan as a violation of their rights. If Google was going to use their works, they wanted to be asked for permission—and they wanted a cut of any profits.

Google maintained that scanning the books was “fair use.” While all books would be indexed and searchable on the Google Books site, users would only be able to access the full text of books that were out of copyright and in the public domain. If a book was still under copyright, and its rights-holder had not given permission, then a search would only return a small “snippet” of text, not the whole book or even a page.

In mid-2005, the Author's Guild and the American Association of Publishers filed suit to stop Google from scanning any more books. Soon the Author's Guild's case was certified as a class-action lawsuit, meaning that anyone who had ever published a book—millions of authors—would be part of the class represented and would be bound by the result of the case.