“Google and five publishers settled a long-standing legal battle over whether scanning university-library books and using snippets in search results can be done without the permission of copyright holders,” reports ReadWriteWeb.
“While the agreement lets Google continue its work, both sides deliberately avoided tackling the issue at the heart of the conflict: What does fair use mean in the digital age?”
Taking the debate to court would have put the fair-use doctrine at the forefront, “leaving open the possibility that a judge’s interpretation could give either side much less than they wanted,” suggests the article. “As a result, agreeing to disagree on their rights under the law apparently seemed like the wiser choice.”
“In terms of coming to an agreement on what was fair use, it was an agreement to disagree,” Andi Sporkin, the publishers’ spokesman told Wired. “We were able to get beyond that and establish business terms. Did we come up with a universal definition of fair use? No.”
“Fair use is an exception to the copyright law that gives authors exclusive rights over their creative works,” ReadWriteWeb explains. “In passing the limitation, Congress tried to balance the rights of copyright holders with the need of academia, critics, columnists, reporters and researchers to quote other works.”
Google claims its book scans fall under fair use because only portions of the book are available. Consumers wanting more are directed to where the hard copies are available.
Even after the deal, publishers dislike having whole books saved in Google’s database without permission. Also, the Authors Guild is still addressing the same copyright concerns with Google.
“Those opponents came to agreement last year, but a federal judge threw out the deal, saying the settlement gave Google more rights than those granted by Congress under the law,” the article states.
No Comments Yet
You can be the first to comment!
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.