Authors Guild - Conflict With Google

Conflict With Google

On September 20, 2005, the Authors Guild, together with Herbert Mitgang, Betty Miles and Daniel Hoffman, filed a class action lawsuit against Google for its Book Search project. According to the Authors Guild, Google was committing copyright infringement by scanning books that were still in copyright. (Google countered that their use was fair according to US copyright law.)

On October 28, 2008 the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and Google announced that they had settled Authors Guild v. Google. Google agreed to a $125 million payout, $45 million of that to be paid to rightsholders whose books were scanned without permission. The Google Book Search Settlement Agreement allows for legal protection for Google's scanning project, even though neither side changed its position about whether scanning books was fair use or copyright infringement. The Settlement also establishes a new regulatory organization, the Book Rights Registry, which will be responsible for allocating fees from Google to rightsholders. The settlement is subject to approval by a federal court.

The Guild employs approximately fifteen full-time employees, collected US$1.6 million in 2006 & 2007, and paid expenses of $1.8 million and $1.5 million during those years while generating $30 million dollars in 2009 for the law firm representing the guild in the Google Books settlement, according to Paul Aiken, Executive Director of the Guild.

In 2009, direct and indirect revenue to the Guild should exceed US$50 million due to the Google settlement, with $34.5 million paid upfront as a "registry fee" to a separate, not-yet-established organization set up by the Guild. In September 2009, the US Department of Justice announced that it was pursuing an antitrust investigation into this settlement and on September 20 recommended to a New York court that they reject the Google book deal.