ALA/ARL Issues Guide to Google Settlement

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 11/19/2008

• New guide via ARL and ALA
• In-copyright books: 20% display
• Public Access Service: one terminal for 4000 FTE

(This article originally appeared in the November 18 issue of the LJ Academic Newswire.)

If you are confused by exactly what the recent Google Book Search settlement with publishers and authors might mean for your library, you’re hardly alone. The settlement, over 200 pages with its definitions and other addenda, was in dire need of a translator—and it got one, in Washington-based lawyer Jonathan Band. At the behest of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the American Library Association (ALA), Band authored "A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement," a translation into practical terms of the settlement’s complex provisions, with an emphasis on those that apply directly to libraries n the Internet. Instead, it neatly clarifies what’s at stake. “The settlement is extremely complex,” Band notes, “so this paper of necessity simplifies many of its details.” The paper should not, however, be treated as legal advice, he says, instead urging libraries considering whether to join Google Book Search as a library partner, or librarians considering whether to join the settlement, to retain their own counsel.  

The paper does not take a position on the settlement itself, but if you’re looking for positions, there are no shortages of those

Looking at the details
Under the basic framework, Google would create a mechanism for Google to pay rightsholders (the Registry), and would retain 37 percent of the revenue it generates under this program. Not a bad cut for a rights clearance mechanism. 

Moving from snippets to a “preview” option, Google would display all of its public domain texts, and up to 20 percent of an in-copyright book’s text. For most non-fiction works, Google generally would display no more than five “adjacent pages” at a time. For fiction, Google would display five percent of the book or 15 adjacent pages, whichever is less. 

For poetry or short stories, dictionaries, drug reference guides, encyclopedias, price/buyer guides, quotation books, test preparation guides, and thesauri, Google would provide only a “fixed preview,” displaying the same pages regardless of the user query, up to ten percent of the book.“Google will make these classifications in accordance with Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) codes.

And here’s a neat little tidbit: users will be able to make “book annotations” of their purchased books. As Band explains, a book annotation is user-generated text that is displayed on any Web page on which a page of a book appears. The user could share his annotations with up to 25 other individuals who have purchased the book through this service and who have been designated by the user.

Public Access Service
In addition, Google has agreed to provide free Public Access Service to each public library and not-for-profit higher education institution that requests it—one per public library building and one per 4000 full-time equivalent students. Users at that terminal would be able to view full text of all in-copyright, not commercially available books in the Institutional Subscription Database. No copying and pasting would be allowed, but print would be allowed for a "reasonable" per-page fee.

Google also would sell institutional subscriptions to the database and to discipline-based subsets of it. Authorized users at subscribing institutions would be able to copy and paste up to four pages and print up to 20 pages with a single command. A watermark on printed pages would identify the authorized user.

The pricing would be governed by objectives that the plaintiffs—none of which were libraries—and Google asserted were compatible: the realization of revenue at market rates for rightsholders and the realization of broad access by the public. Pricing would be guided by the cost of similar products and services, the scope of books available, the quality of the scan, and the features offered.

As for remote access, only higher education institutions could offer remote access to faculty at home and students in dorms without approval from the Book Rights Registry, the new mechanism to implement the settlement, whose board will consist of equal numbers of representatives of publishers and authors.

Of course, as Band notes, all of this is subject to final court approval and implementation. Things, of course, may change a little, or a lot.

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