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By Root 2063 0

63 percent of the revenues Google obtained from its digital books database and, after skimming off a percentage to fund itself, distribute them to the appropriate recipients, as recorded in its own exhaustive database of copyright owners. Its model was clearly that of the performing rights agencies that had been established at the turn of the twentieth century to deal with the then-new medium of the phonograph, and theAuthors' Guild described the BRR as "the writers' equivalent ofASCAP." Google agreed to pay $34.5 million to set up this registry.

The BRR would become the lynchpin of the digital library. The book search program would now be freely accessible from U.S. public libraries or universities. Readers could freely read out-of-print digitized works there, whether or not they were in copyright, and print out pages for a charge. Google's income would come from institutional subscription fees, charges levied on individuals for access to in-print books, and, as ever, advertising. In the future, Google could scan and display online any copyrighted book that was not commercially available (that is, roughly, one not in print) unless the copyright owner explicitly opted out. The company could also scan copyrighted books that were in print-but the resulting digital copies would not be displayed openly unless publishers and authors explicitly opted in. Instead an independently hosted "Research Corpus" of these digitalworks would come into existence, accessible only by "qualified users" for research in computational analysis, informatics, linguistics, and the like. In addition, each participating library would get its own digital copy of everywork scanned at that library, for preservation and archiving purposes. Each newly scanned bookwould earn a sum, hoped to be $200, for being included in the system. And a one-off payment of at least $6o would go to the copyright owner of everywork already scanned. From Google's annual subvention, 25 percent would be allocated to these "inclusion fees." The other 75 percent would then be distributed as "usage fees," according to actual consultation of the digital copies. But after ten years the BRR board would appraise the situation and might decide to abandon inclusion fees if revenues did not allow for high enough sums. In the end, therefore, the new world of digital books would come to rest on distinctions of two kinds: between books themselves and between uses of books. Uses could be either display or nondisplay; books could be either in print or not. Copyright per se was declared a secondary issue. But in order for this to carry weight, those distinctions between books and uses would need to be made secure. So the settlement enjoined a common "security standard" for digital books, tying both Google and the BRR into the proliferating intellectual property defense economy.

It therefore looked as though the crisis of digitized books, triggered by Google's scanning project, would be resolved by creatively combining another variant of the old registry concept with the new practices of digital antipiracy. Significantly, however, at the time of the settlement's announcement, responses were not all welcoming. At Harvard, the university library declined to participate in the plan as it applied to in-copyright works. The university librarian was Robert Darnton. Darnton's historical researches into the eighteenth-century book had done more than any other to create awareness of the importance of print and its products in the time of the Enlightenment and French Revolution, when the ideas of copyright and the universal library originated, and in recent years he had been a major proponent of digital scholarship. Now he pointed out that the proposed regime would in fact limit the uses of digital books quite severely. Moreover, it would create a single access system- Google's -with no competition. The quality of its copies could vary: "in many cases," Darnton wrote, they would omit "photographs, illustrations and other pictorial works," severely reducing their research and educational value. Others