ject to sharing provisions. The revenue streams will come from ads appearing next to displays of in-copyright books in response to user queries and from individual and institutional subscriptions to some or all of the books in the corpus. Google and the BRR may also develop new business models over time that will be subject to similar sharing.
One of the main jobs of the BRR will be to distribute these revenues. The money will go, less BRR’s costs, to authors and publishers who have registered their copyright claims with the BRR. Although the settlement agreement extends only to books published prior to January 5, 2009, the BRR is expected to attract authors and publishers of later-published books to participate in the revenue-sharing arrangement that Google has negotiated with the BRR.
Class Action settlement By now, Communications readers may be a bit puzzled. How can Google be getting a license to make millions of in-copyright books available through Book Search just by settling a lawsuit brought by a small fraction of authors and publishers?
U.S. law allows the filing of “class action” lawsuits whose lead plaintiffs claim they represent a class of persons who have suffered the same kind of harm as a result of the defendant’s wrongful conduct as long as there are common issues of fact and law that make it desirable to adjudicate the claims in one lawsuit instead of many.
The Authors Guild and three of its members sued Google, claiming to represent a class of similarly situated authors whose books Google was scan-
ning and whose copyrights Google was violating. By bringing a class action lawsuit, the Authors Guild put considerable financial pressure on Google because the winner of a class action lawsuit is entitled to an award that equals all of the monies owed to the class, which may be exponentially higher than awards to individual plaintiffs.
In the absence of a settlement agreement, Google would almost certainly have vigorously fought against certification of the class in the Authors Guild case. After all, the guild has only a few thousand members and most of them do not write the kinds of scholarly works that are typically found in major university research libraries. Many scholarly book authors might want their books to be scanned by the Book Search project so they will be more accessible to potential readers.
The publisher lawsuit did not start out as a class action lawsuit, perhaps in part because McGraw-Hill et al. recognized how difficult it would be for them to prove they adequately represented a class of all book publishers whose books Google had scanned.
However, the agreement that Google
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