ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Yesterday I went to a most helpful ASA seminar by Dr Jeremy Fisher who is Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors, an association to which all Aussie authors should belong.  Apart from the advocacy work they do on our behalf, they also provide information which is crucial to protecting author’s copyright, and so it was that I turned up at the quaint premises of the English Speaking Union in South Yarra to hear Jeremy explain about the Google Books settlement.  What follows is my understanding of what he said, supplemented by the CAL Guide to the Google Settlement.  Authors should NOT rely on this blogpost which is written to alert authors that they need to find out more, from authoritative sources such as the ASA or CAL and the Google Book Settlement website.

Everybody Googles, and most of us have therefore encountered Google Books.  Google BookSearch has bibliographic data and sample pages of books for browsing.  Sometimes you can read the whole book; sometimes it’s just a preview and sometimes it just provides basic bibliographic data.  There are adverts for bookshops on the same page, from which Google will generate income.  A helpful resource; I’ve used it myself, but I wasn’t at all happy to find some of my stuff up there, without my permission.

Here’s what happened: Google began digitising books in various American libraries, claiming the digitisation was ok under ‘fair-use’ copyright exemption rules.  (There are no ‘fair-use’ exemption rules in Australia; we have CAL (the Copyright Agency Ltd) which provides payments for authors when their work is copied.)  Google’s right to do this was challenged in the American courts, and a settlement was reached:

Google will make one-off payments to authors whose work has been digitised without permission. They have set aside megabucks to cover the costs of doing this: they are paying $60 USD for Books and $15 USD for Inserts.  (Inserts are works like poems, illustrations, chapters, excerpts etc).  (BTW I do know the rules of capitalisation: I am capitalising Books and Inserts because all the legal mumbo-jumbo does; these words have a legal meaning in the Settlement – which also has a legal meaning.)

These payments apply ONLY to works which have already been digitised without authorisation, up to 5 January 2009.  (Since then they have entered into ‘Partnership Programs’ with publishers, getting legal permission to digitise the books.  This blog post is NOT about the Partnership Program, and the info in it does not apply to any books digitised after the cut-off date of 5 January 2009.  Queries about any digitisation under the Partnership Program should be taken up with publishers.)

For Australian authors, a decision must be made, and quickly.  Authors need to search GoogleBooks to find out if their work has been digitised without permission, and then decide whether to opt out, or not, on or before 5 May 2009.   If you want to opt out, you need to notify them in writing, either online at Google Books Settlement or by prepaid airmail addressed to Google Book Settlement Administrator, c/- Rust Consulting, PO Box 9364, Minneapolis, MN 55440-9364 USA.

Start by doing the search, don’t start late at night, and have a coffee and some chocolate biscuits to sustain you as you search, because it can take a while.  Who would have thought there were so many authors with the name Lisa Hill in the world, eh? It took me ages and ages to work through page after page of the search results, but patience paid off because that’s how I found the culprits who have used excerpts from my Indonesia book without ever telling me about it and long after any publisher copyright had reverted to me.  These excerpts are Inserts under the terms of the Settlement.  They represent about $200 AUD (I think) and that’s enough to buy 6-8 books so I’m certainly going to claim it.   (This seach is also how I found out that the previous publisher appears to have passed on my title to another publisher, again without any mention of it to me, but since it’s out of print I don’t really care very much about that.) 

Ok, start searching.  Begin on  http://books.google.com.au/ but also check http://books.google.com/ just in case a work shows up there that isn’t on the Australian search page. 

At the seminar, Jeremy had a handout I can’t reproduce which showed different examples of search results, but the key thing to look for is information under the ‘More Details’ section in the ‘About This Book’ sub menu.  If it has been digitised, it will say so, and it will also show the library that it was digitised from.  Searching for my 4 books shows that they haven’t been digitised because there is no mention of digitisation.  Search using the example that Jeremy used: ‘Tribal Guerillas’ and you will see the digitisation notice and its source.  You will also see that although no content shows up, you can search using the search button at the bottom.  Try typing in ‘naxalite movement’ and you will see snippets of content come up and what page they’re from.   Some books display more content than others; so look thoroughly for any mention of your name or nom de plume in your initial search – Inserts (excerpts, poems, illustrations, chapters, reports etc) could possibly be worth a lot of money if there are lots of them.

Search Twelfth Night, or What You Will, and of course you will see numerous examples.  The first ones allow you a full view of the material and you can read the entire play online.  That’s ok, I think Shakespeare’s copyright has lapsed by now.  But if you click on the 4th one down, the Heinemann one with ISBN 0435192043 you will find that you can preview enough of it to see that it’s a really good version of the play for school students, but after a while the preview gives way to a little notice telling you that you’ve seen enough i.e. it’s copyrighted material and the publisher has excluded some of it from viewing so that you have to buy the book if you want it.   You will also see over the RHS that the work is displayed by permission with the publisher under the Partnership Program.  This means that this book is NOT subject to the Google Book Settlement.  (Again, if you’re not happy about this, you need to take it up with your publisher. )

So, assuming you’ve discovered some of your work has been digitised without your permission, the next tricky part is deciding whether it’s in your interests to opt out, or do nothing or to claim your book.  (Well, actually, there are quite a few tricky parts, e.g. what happens if your books are out-of-print, or not commercially available in Australia, but CAL or the ASA should be your source of information for situations like that.)

If you do nothing by 5 May 2009 Google can legally use your Books and Inserts and they don’t have to pay you for them. They can

• continue to digitise Books and Inserts
• sell access to its database to assorted users in the US
• sell online access to individual Books
• sell ads on pages from Books
• display snippets and bibliographic info from Books and Inserts.

If you choose to remain in the settlement you have until 5 January 2010 to make a claim for your Books or Inserts.  You can claim the cash payment, and you will also have the right to exclude some or all of the work on the Google display pages.   You can do this online or download the form from the Google Settlement Page. Theoretically, if you stay in, you could also receive additional payments (63% of revenue raised by the advertising) but this could be miniscule amounts, and it’s not clear who gets to claim it, the publisher or the author.  Your publisher will have the right to ‘turn off’ any competing ads from other publishers, so there might not be much worth claiming anyway.   If you have a number of Inserts, it may well be worth your while to claim the $15USD insert fee, though you need to assess where most of your income comes from.  If most of it comes from CAL payments (like mine does) you might be better off to opt out, (though if it eventually becomes cheaper for Australian schools to register with Google instead of paying for a CAL Statutory Licence, then the CAL income might drop).  Deciding what to do in this situation is a bit difficult.

If you choose to remain in the Settlement there is a further deadline (after you’ve made your claim by the deadline as per the paragraph above).  You have until 5 April 2011 to make written requests to have your Book or Insert removed from Google’s digitised database. 

To claim, to opt out, to exclude some or all of your work or just to find out exactly what it all means, you need to go to the Google Settlement Page.

And don’t dither, there’s not a lot of time left to make up your mind about what to do.

Many, many thanks to Jeremy and the ASA for making this information available.