Book Ruling Cuts Options for Google

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Now that a judge has curtailed Google’s ambitions to create a giant digital bookstore and library, the company is left with few appealing options.

Google may take the battle from the courtroom to Congress, to promote a law that would make orphan works — books that are still under copyright but whose author or copyright owner can't be found — widely available. Publishers and authors could drop or revive their original copyright lawsuit against Google, which claimed that even Google’s more modest initial plan to scan books and show snippets of their text was illegal. Those issues have never been litigated. Another option, which publishers and authors said was attractive to them, would be to reach a new settlement with Google that requires each author or copyright owner to opt in and permit Google to digitize their works. Google has called the opt-in solution unworkable. Google would not be interested in such an agreement because it already allows publishers to join with Google to show more of their digitized works, and the point of the original settlement was to automatically opt in vast quantities of books, said people briefed on the settlement who were not authorized to speak publicly about it.


Book Ruling Cuts Options for Google Google Book Deal Faces Big Hurdle (WSJ)