San Francisco - Google has reached a 125-million-dollar settlement of a class action lawsuit by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, which will drastically expand the availability of digitized books over the internet, the groups announced Tuesday. The deal sets aside 45 million dollars for payment to authors and publishers for books already scanned. It also sets up the Book Rights Registry, which will resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and cover legal fees.
The new rights tracking organization will pay the rights holders when institutions buy access to the full online rights and for printouts at public libraries.
The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers agreed to work with Google to expand the company's BookSearch project to provide more access to out-of-print books, create new ways to purchase copyrighted books electronically, expand institutional subscriptions to colleges, universities and other organizations and provide free electronic access to books from designated computers in US public and university libraries.
The lawsuit was launched in 2005 against Google's BookSearch programme that scans entire books online and allows people to read and search an entire published work.
"This historic settlement is a win for everyone," said Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American Publishers.
"From our perspective, the agreement creates an innovative framework for the use of copyrighted material in a rapidly digitizing world, serves readers by enabling broader access to a huge trove of hard-to-find books, and benefits the publishing community by establishing an attractive commercial model that offers both control and choice to the rights holder."
"It's hard work writing a book, and even harder work getting paid for it," said Roy Blount, president of the Authors Guild. "As a reader and researcher, I'll be delighted to stop by my local library to browse the stacks of some of the world's great libraries.
"As an author, well, we appreciate payment when people use our work. This deal makes good sense."
Google founder Sergey Brin said the deal furthered Google's mission to organize the world's information. "Today, together with the authors, publishers and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor," said Brin.
"While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips."
