it's not about being altruistic.. but about standing up for principles instead of capitulating to legal extortions. Too often what's 'right' or 'wrong' is determined by legal budgets rather than merits of the arguments.
plus, getting the right foundations of internet laws set will help google in the long run. Any settlement would just open Google up for legal extortions from places they wouldn't have imagined.
Who ever said that Google should be able to digitize copyrighted works and display them for free? They probably settled because they knew they were legally in the wrong.
Rights holders suing to legitimately protect their IP is not extortion.
From my understanding, you are wrong about the use of the scanning. Google didn't want to scan books so that users could then read them, it was scanning them to index them for a book search. So someone could search for books that contained certain text instead of just searching by title, author, etc.
I'm not sure why you think indexing books for searches is equivalent to "digitize copyrighted works and display them for free".
Well, they had to digitize them (presumably using OCR) so you can search them, which they did without permission from the rights holders. They then displayed (and still do) chunks of the books for free, again without permission from rights holders. I have read multiple pages of my book there.
That seems to me just as much a violation of copyright law as having Daily Show clips on Red Lasso was. They're certainly not exempted as a service provider under the DMCA when they're uploading the content themselves.
As an author, I'm not opposed to this if I'm given the right to opt out, and I'm compensated for any sort of AdWords type stuff run along side it. But many authors will be, and Google didn't ask us or give us a way to opt out.
For me personally, I think it benefits me to have sections of my book there, so I'm happy about it. But I can certainly see why some authors wouldn't care for that at all, and it's not up to Google to decide how those rights holders' property can be used.
I talked to a former attorney who is now a literary agent (and who therefore may be biased) back when the suit first appeared and he said it was pretty much an open and shut case and that it was just a question of how much Google was going to lose.
2. How is this any different than web search? Google indexes the contents of websites and displays a snippet of relevant content based on what you search. What makes book search different from a legal perspective?
3. I highly doubt that Google would have continued to pursue this course of action if it was as open-and-shut as the attorney you quoted seemed to think.
1) Was that there before the suit was initiated? It's possible everything the Authors' Guild (of which I'm a member) sent me is misleading, but they certainly indicated it was not possible for most authors to have their works removed. Regardless, there's the question of whether authors should have to opt out. Clearly you can't just start giving away Beatles records or songs or even clips of songs until Paul McCartney asks you nicely to stop. Why should it be any different for writing?
2) I don't know, but clearly uploading clips of The Daily Show is illegal, and Google most certainly can't get away with that. Hell, they might not even get away with hosting a service to which other people upload clips of The Daily Show. Books would seem to be more like that, since they are copyrighted works that aren't publicly available for free on the web already, and instead must be actively uploaded.
3) You're right, they wouldn't and that's why they didn't. They settled the first suit that came along and paid $125 million plus ongoing royalties because they realized they were going to lose.
this isn't evil. there's a very real chance that google will lose the suit if they take it all the way, so settling at least buys them the ability to go forward with their book indexing project and protects them from a potentially very large legal liability. it's not like google set out to strike an exclusive-right-to-copy deal.
Also it's worth mentioning that the plaintiffs are fearful of ending up with a bad precedent for their side, so they often settle on good terms for Google...
I think part of the difference is that robots.txt was established early enough to become a de facto standard way to opt out of automated indexing. There is no equivalent system for print, where the convention is that everything is fully protected by copyright by default.
Another difference is that automated indexing has become inherent to web publishing, so much that people publish with the expection that Google will index their pages. Book authors, on the other hand, publish with the expectation that their works are not indexed in this fashion.
