If you get your hands on 18 million books you don’t own, make full copies of them, and look to profit from them online, expect a bit of legal trouble. Google’s latest headache is from photographers and illustrators. You go, visual artists!

Let me say up front that while the Copyright Alliance didn’t play a part in the development of the March 7 class-action suit against Google by photography and graphic arts organizations and individual photographers and graphic artists — and the Copyright Alliance hasn’t been involved in the Google Book Settlement pending in court — but I have myriad professional and personal connections among the visual arts plaintiffs. Disclaimer below.

You can read a press release on the suit here, and this is The New York Times’ take on the case (I believe they had the story first).

It’s not a surprise, really. The Google Book Settlement stemmed from a class-action suit by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Authors’ Guild against Google for massive infringement. (AAP is a Copyright Alliance member.) Whatever you may think of the settlement in its various iterations, one thing that has never been denied — it’s spelled out clearly in the settlement language and has been affirmed by the judge weighing the settlement — is that parties that weren’t party to the original class action are not a party to the settlement.

That left visual artists on the sidelines. They petitioned to join the settlement, and the judge basically said, “No, but you can file your own suit.” And they have done so.

There’s another party explicitly excluded from the settlement — songwriters and their music publisher partners. Song lyrics in books typically are licensed, and of course there are printed musical scores aplenty. It will be interesting to see if those parties also file their own class-action suit.

The plaintiffs in the April 7 suit can point to specific cases in which books from a multitude of libraries who had loaned their books to Google for scanning had images scanned without authorization. That’s a fact that even Google can’t argue with. Now Google’s argument that scanning 18 million books without the permission of the rightsholders involved in those books is “fair use.” A few million of those books were in the public domain, but imagine how devalued copyright would be if a corporation can make a copy of every single copyrighted work without permission with the possibility of monetizing them. Essentially copyright ceases to exist, but that wouldn’t be any great loss to the “public interest” groups that supported Google’s original scanning and legal defense in the authors’ class action suit, or of course it’s the ultimate desire of Google and its outspoken copyright counsel.

Who knows where this will lead, but my heartfelt congratulations to visual artists across the U.S. for banding together and suing the most powerful global corporation in the online world today in defense of their rights.

DISCLOSURE: Four of the plaintiff organizations — the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), the Professional Photographers of America (PPA), the Picture Archive Council of America (PACA), and the Graphic Artists Guild (GAG) — are Copyright Alliance members. PPA served on our board in 2008, ASMP does currently. In addition, I consider two of the individual plaintiffs friends. Leif Skoogfors, an accomplished photographer, spoke at the May 2007 launch of the Copyright Alliance and is active in our one voi(c) grassroots network. John Schmelzer and I have connected due to his tenure as president of GAG. He has been featured at our 2008 and 2009 EXPOnentials on Capitol Hill. Perhaps more importantly to me, this masterful illustrator with decades of professional experience has served as an informal mentor to my daughter, an aspiring visual artist. He gave her some valuable lessons at last fall’s EXPO, so valuable she says she learned more over those few hours than she has in dozens of hours of classroom instruction. My favorite piece of advice from John to my daughter? He had her sketching EXPO attendees, and she complained about how hard it is to sketch candids of individuals because they keep moving. Emphasizing the need to develop speed, John told her “If you want to sketch still people, sketch cadavers.”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 8:16 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright law, fair use, licensing, piracy, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.