Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4. US colleges and universities would have the opportunity to purchase subscriptions
that would enable their students to gain online access to the collections of some of
the world's greatest libraries.
5. Authors and publishers would receive payments earned from the online access of
their books, fees paid when people printed pages from their books, and advertising
revenues.
As part of the settlement, Google agreed to pay $125 million to resolve legal claims
made by authors and publishers, cover their legal fees, and establish the Topic Rights
Registry. By registering their works with the topic Rights Registry, copyright holders
would be able to receive payments resulting from institutional subscriptions, book sales,
and advertising revenues.
The out-of-court settlement was controversial [43]. According to some, Google
should not have made a deal with the plaintiffs. They felt Google's use of the copyrighted
material was a fair use, based on the precedent of
Kellyv.ArribaSoftCorporation
, and if
Google had gone to trial and been found not guilty, the public would have been able to
access these books at lower rates. Others criticized the settlement because they thought it
gave Google a virtual monopoly over
orphaned works
: copyrighted books for which the
copyright owner cannot be located. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also expressed
concerns about the potential chilling effect of Google tracking the pages that people are
viewing.
In March 2011, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected
the proposed settlement. The judge ruled that the agreement “would give Google a
significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying
of copyrighted works without permission” [44]. In particular, the judge objected to
the part of the agreement that would have given Google liberal rights over orphaned
works; according to the judge, a process for making use of orphaned books should be
established by Congress, not a federal judge. Meanwhile, Google now has scanned more
than 20 million books, even though most of them are still under copyright [45].
CDs and DVDs store sounds and images in digital form. When information is stored dig-
itally, anyone with the right equipment can make perfect copies. China is the principal
source of counterfeit CDs and DVDs (Figure 4.8) [46].
The increase in the number of people with broadband Internet connections has
stimulated digital copying. Although a patient person with an ordinary dial-up connec-
tion to the Internet can download large files, connections that are dozens of times faster
make file sharing much more practical. As more people have gained DSL or cable access
to the Internet, the number of downloads has soared [47]. Broadband connections have
also made video sharing much more popular. As a result, the music industry has lost
sales. Total revenue from music sales and licensing in the United States dropped from
$14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009 [48].
