Online books and copyright law

[Commentary] Google Books raised difficult questions about who should profit. If every book ever written could be found online, readers and researchers would benefit. But what about authors and publishers or, as they are known these days, “content creators”? What part should they play?

At the heart of the problem was the question of orphan works — out-of-print books still protected by copyright for which the holders cannot be found. Google already has the right to scan books for which the copyright has expired, and books in print are easily bought online. So the orphan works, even if relatively few, are both crucial to the project and vexing in terms of rights and wrongs. An essential piece of any such solution is a body, similar to the recording industry’s ASCAP, that would be able to search for rights holders, disperse funds and oversee collective licensing of copyrighted works. This is an accepted strategy for exactly such situations, where an opt-in approach would be prohibitively onerous. The objection to the Google Books settlement has never been to the prospect of a digital library. National libraries of other countries, and libraries and nonprofits in the United States, have their own efforts underway to digitize their collections; and Google may yet end up with the best approach. There is no question that such a database is worth having, but it is worth having fairly, legally and with consent.