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According to Reuters, Google and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) have reached a settlement in the long-running Google Book Search Litigation. Details remain sketchy. The settlement does not affect Google’s current litigation with the Authors Guild.

Nature has just published a comment piece by Matthew Jockers, Jason Schultz myself explaining why humanities scholars filed amicus briefs in the Authors Guild v. Google and Authors Guild v. HathiTrust lawsuits. These suits are still very much alive and it is not clear that the Authors Guild has the same incentives to settle as the AAP did.

Additional Links:

• Joint Press Release
• Techdirt comment that this is exactly what Google offered 7 years ago. “Basically, this settlement is AAP admitting that the entire lawsuit was a waste of time and money.”
• James Grimmelman’s summary. “the settlement does not change the situation on the ground in any significant way”
• Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly quotes AAP president Tom Allen saying “[we] out an arrangement that doesn’t resolve the legal issues. We agree to disagree on those, but as a practical matter, it does resolve our differences with Google.”
  

 

I have just added a page to this website devoted to the history of fair use. As I note in my article The Pre-History of Fair Use 76 Brooklyn Law Review 1371-1412 (2011), fair use does not begin with early American cases such as Folsom v. Marsh in 1841, as many accounts assume. The fair use doctrine began over a century earlier when English courts were considering issues of republishing and abridgment — the remix culture of the 1700′s.

My main points are

• Copyright has always involved some balancing between authors rights and users rights. Fair use is part of the legal tradition of every country that traces its copyright law back to the Statute of Anne.
• Fair use did not take away from authors rights, it made it possible for the courts to take a purposive reading of the copyright act that actually expanded authors rights.

Supra is the word of the year.

Without all the Bluebook clutter it looks like this:

I will be presenting my paper on copyright and the digital humanities, “Orphan Works as Grist for the Data Mill” at this years Intellectual Property Scholars Conference at Stanford Law School on Friday August 10, 2012.