Updates on some recent court decisions:
The Google Books
lawsuit: Years ago, Google started
the “Google Books” project, an effort to scan 130 million books from libraries
worldwide by 2020 (you can read more about it and its relevance to libraries here). There was no controversy about Google
scanning pre-1923 books no longer under copyright, but some objected to Google
scanning out-of-print books that were still protected by copyright law. Just recently, “a panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said
Circuit Judge Denny Chin prematurely certified a class of authors without first
deciding if the ‘fair use’ defense under U.S. copyright law allowed Google to
display snippets of books.” (from
Reuters) John Dvorak, writing at PCMag.com, comments: “This
is not over yet. The Author's Guild is going to sue Google over the fair use
standard. This should, once and for all, give us some definitions of fair use
that we can all benefit from. As far as the Author's Guild is concerned Google
abuses its scans by letting people read snippets of the copyrighted books.”
(link to his piece here)
Apple E-Book lawsuit:
Not long ago, Amazon.com had priced new
e-Books at $9.99, and had a virtual monopoly on the e-Book market. This led Apple to work with publishers so
they could overcome this advantage using an “agency [pricing] model”
(mentioned on this blog here).
Just recently, the U.S. District Judge
Denise Cote in Manhattan “sided with government regulators' contention that
Apple joined five major book publishers to gang up [on] Amazon.com in a
price-fixing conspiracy that caused consumers to pay more for electronic books.” Words of the late Steve Jobs influenced the
federal judge in determining that “Apple Inc. milked the popularity of its
iTunes store to form an illegal cartel with publishers to raise electronic book
prices.” (from the
A.P.) Apple denies any wrongdoing,
and Ankur Kapoor,
antitrust lawyer for the law firm
Constantine Cannon, thinks Apple may win its appeal. He contends that Jobs
may have simply understood the industry dynamics and cut smart deals – and that
he did not necessarily get all the publishers to agree to raise prices, a
practice known as "horizontal price fixing" (from A.P. article and Joab
Jackson at Computerworld.com)
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