I was waiting for it. It was inevitable. Now it’s happened.
GBS freaks (followers of the Google Books Settlement story) like me will recall that the legal challenge to Google’s galactic-size book scanning project was (originally) not so much about how Google would or could use the scanned data, but the fact that Google was scanning these books without clearing copyright from the authors and publishers. It was going to be a galactic-sized Fair Use challenge, but turned instead into let’s-make-a-deal settlement proposal between Google, the Authors’ Guild, and the Association of American Publishers.
The fact remained, however — and this is what kept occupying the back of my mind — that Google had scanned the books full page by full page, illustrations and all. Lots of those illustrations, however, don’t show up in Google Book Search books. Photos, artwork, even maps and some charts don’t show up. Which sometimes means that when the text says something like “as you can see in illus. 27a,” you’re out of luck.
And the reason the artwork and photographs and illustrations have been expurgated is of course because they were usually not drawn or photographed by the author, but licensed from other copyright holders. As anyone who works in museum publishing knows, a book can contain, oh, at least 200 or so different copyrighted bits of content. On a good day.
So, putting two and two together, it seemed inevitable that Google’s dodging of the issue wouldn’t succeed forever. The artwork and photographs had been scanned and presumably stored for future use, without permission:
another class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
This time it’s a lawsuit from the creative community of photographers and visual artists including: the American Society of Media Photographers, Graphic Artists Guild, the North American Nature Photography Association, the Professional Photographers of America, and individual photographers and illustrators.
Good blog post on the issue from (MCN 2009 speaker) Peter Brantley at Open Book Alliance, here.
Also an article in the NYT, Visual Artists to Sue Google Over Vast Library Project.
It probably follows that the Google Book Settlement legal challenge will now be a front-row issue for museums.
