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Yale University Press and the Google Settlement
Yale University Press and the Google Settlement
The original deadlines provided by the Google Settlement have been extended as follows: the opt-out deadline has
been delayed until September 4, 2009, and the fairness hearing has been delayed until October 7, 2009.
The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an inquiry into the Settlement, which may have an impact on the court’s review and
approval of the proposed settlement agreement.
In recent weeks, arguments for and against the Settlement have heated up from groups representing both rightsholders and
content users.
The terms of the recent Settlement arrived at by the parties
in the class action lawsuits, brought against Google for digitizing hundreds of
thousands of books without permission of their copyright owners and publishers,
will be reviewed in a Fairness Hearing by the U.S. District Court for the
Southern District of New York on June 11, 2009. At this time any comments and
objections received by the Court to the terms of the settlement will be
considered, and the Settlement will be approved, amended, or disapproved.
Yale University Press has made the decision that it will opt
in to the terms of the Settlement which are pending approval by the Court, and
is currently taking steps to comply with those terms. This means that Yale University
Press staff is working through the documents posted on the Settlement website (http://www.googlebooksettlement.com)
to claim on behalf of our authors and the Press all books which are still under
copyright and for which rights have not reverted to the authors.
Rights to books published prior to 1923 are in the public
domain and no action need be taken concerning them; some few books published
since 1923 have also moved into the public domain as well, but most books
published by the Press are still protected by copyright, and thus will be subject
to the Settlement terms. Some books which are under copyright but were out of
print with Yale have been put back in print and made commercially available in
the past few years, and we have been working to make many more available in the
near future.
If you know or believe that your book or books are still in
copyright, you may go to the Settlement website indicated above, search for your
titles, and claim your book(s).
If the publication rights were reverted to you by Yale,
you are solely responsible for claiming them with Google.
If Yale still holds publication rights and has not
reverted them to you, Yale will make a claim for these book(s), so that if
you are unable to make the claim, be assured that it will be made on your
behalf.
The terms of the Settlement will govern how and what
decisions can be made regarding the various revenue-generating plans for the
books under Google’s aegis, and many of those plans have not yet been
determined. Pending decisions concerning those plans, making claims for the
books, whether by the publisher, the author, or both, will yield payments of
not less than $60 per book. These payments will belong to the authors alone
where rights have reverted. The payments will be shared between the author and
the Press according to the terms of our publishing agreement in the case where
rights remain with the Press, and will be paid in the royalty period following
receipt of the payment by Yale.
Please check this site for updated information, which will
appear as often as necessary to keep our authors informed.
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