A federal judge has denied a motion filed on behalf of photographers and graphic artists seeking to intervene in the Google Books settlement, a long-running legal negotiation to compensate copyright holders when their work is reproduced through Google’s book scanning project.
In a decision Wednesday, Judge
Denny Chin wrote that the visual artists groups are free to file their own lawsuit, but cannot join the suit already filed by the Author's Guild and other book publishing interests.
The ruling is a setback for the parties that filed the motion: The American Society of Media Photographers, the Graphic Artists Guild, the Picture Archive Council of America, the North American Nature Photographers Association, and photographers
Joel Meyerowitz,
Dan Budnik,
Pete Turner and
Lou Jacobs Jr.
ASMP, in particular, had lobbied hard for photographers to get a share of the settlement. “We’re evaluating our options,” ASMP executive director
Eugene Mopsik said Wednesday.
Chin wrote that the visual artists acted too late in making their motion this year—the lawsuit began in 2005—and that the case is primarily about text content.
“Frankly, in the context of an online database that is searchable using keywords, it makes sense to prioritize the rights of word-based material,” Chin wrote.
The Google Books settlement is expected to provide a way for book copyright holders to get royalties for the use of their work in Google’s massive online database of books. The settlement would create a registry of copyright holders, and assign them a portion of the advertising revenue Google earns from the project. Copyright holders can already opt out of Google Books. Currently lawyers are reviewing the settlement to avoid anti-trust problems.
In their motion filed earlier this year, the artists groups argued that the settlement would reduce visual artists to “second-class status” in future negotiations with Google, publishers and other parties.
“The Proposed Settlement would sacrifice the interests of Visual Arts Rights Holders to promote the interests of a subset of copyright owners (authors and publishers) and Google,” the groups argued in a court filing. “This abuse of the class action process cannot fairly be judged to be in the public interest.”
But Chin said that line of reasoning was speculative. “The proposed settlement does not concern the rights of [visual artists’] pictorial materials and it binds them in no way,” he wrote.
The case is The Author's Guild et al v. Google Inc., number 1:05-cv-08136-DC in United States District Court, Southern District of New York.
Update, November 5: ASMP released a
statement saying the artists groups are evaluating their options and considering whether to appeal. "[ASMP] believes that the Court's decision missed the basic truth that a settlement that excludes photographic and other visual materials is neither fair nor in the public interest," the statement says.
Related links
Google Books Settlement Agreement page at Google
ASMP's Google Settlement page
Read the November 4, 2009 decision (PDF)
