The latest issue of the Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA is out, and that means that so is my most recent paper, The Elephantine Google Books Settlement. (You may have seen a much earlier version with a different journal’s name attached; the publication process has been long and twisty.) It’s an attempt to boil down the settlement into a single clear concept that makes sense of the whole thing: the settlement used an opt-out class action to bind copyright owners (including the owners of orphan works) to future uses of their books by a single defendant. This is not a piece of close legal analysis; instead, it’s an attempt at a big picture view of the legal issues raised by the settlement.
Here’s the abstract:
The genius - some would say the evil genius - of the proposed Google Books settlement was the way it fuses legal categories. The settlement raised important class action, copyright, and antitrust issues, among others. But just as an elephant is not merely a trunk plus legs plus a tail, the settlement was more than the sum of the individual issues it raised. These “issues” were really just different ways of describing a single, overriding issue of law and policy - a new way to concentrate an intellectual property industry.
In this essay, I argue for the critical importance of seeing the settlement all at once, rather than as a list of independent legal issues. After a brief overview of the settlement and its history (Part I), I describe some of the more significant issues raised by objectors to the settlement, focusing on the trio of class action, copyright, and antitrust law (Part II). The settlement’s proponents responded with colorable defenses to every one of these objections. My point in this Part is not to enter these important debates on one side or the other, but rather to show that the hunt to characterize the settlement has ranged far and wide across the legal landscape.
Truly pinning down the settlement, however, requires tracing the connections between these different legal areas. I argue (Part III) that the central truth of the settlement is that it used an opt-out class action to bind copyright owners (including the owners of orphan works) to future uses of their books by a single defendant. This statement fuses class action, copyright, and antitrust concerns, as well as a few others. It shows that the settlement was, at heart, a vast concentration of power in Google’s hands, for good or for ill. The settlement was a classcopytrustliphant, and we must strive to see it all at once, in its entirety, in all its majestic and terrifying glory.
Also of note in this issue is Jake Linford’s interesting article on the right of first publication in the Internet age. He argues that the long-standing right of a copyright owner to decide when and how a work is first published should be interpreted to also provide a similar right to decide when and how a work is first digitally published. It’s a clever analysis that helps make sense out of Google Books and other Internet copyright debates. I had an enjoyable debate with Jake about the paper when he blogged about it in March.