Google’s mission to put all “the books of the world” on the web is rapidly dividing the academic community. As the debate comes to a crossroads on Oct. 7 — when Justice Denny Chin must decide to either hear oral arguments for a pending class action or dismiss the settlement — the Cornell Library is trying to straddle a rapidly vanishing middle ground.

University Librarian Anne Kenney stated in a letter to the court, dated Sept 2, that despite reservations, the Library supported the deal as providing an “inestimable … potential benefit to research.”

In 2007, Cornell joined five other universities in an agreement with Google to digitize its eight million-volume collection. The goal of the project was to allow Cornell to buy access to Google’s ever-increasing online library. Although copyrighted books — only those published after 1923 — were initially shown in “snippet,” a highly fragmented format, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild filed a lawsuit against Google for copyright violation on Sept. 20, 2005.

The resulting class action settlement — which assumes to be on behalf of all authors — gives Google more rights than it originally assumed; it enables Google to display up to 20 percent of copyrighted books and sell these books online, for which the authors will receive 63 percent of royalties. Google will also pay each author $60 per book.

This settlement only applies to out-of-print books and does not affect “commercially viable,” in-print books.

The deal prompted nearly 800 vociferous court filings, mostly in opposition, from a multiplicity of organizations and businesses, in literary communities and out. The American Association of University Professors and the American Society of Journalist and Authors — both of which have Cornell faculty and alumni in their membership — refute the settlement’s validity.

“The monolithic structure [of the settlement] unfairly requires every copyright holder to have to actively opt out of the agreement,” said Alexandra Owens, ASJA’s Executive Director.

She accused Google of “outright theft [and] profiting off someone else’s property.” Owens also said that “this is a re-writing of copyright law” and a legislative issue that should be decided in Congress.

Although most Cornell faculty contacted by The Sun was unaware of the settlement, those who were in the know opposed it. Like many of her peers, Prof. Helena Viramontes, English, believed the settlement “screws the writers … yet again.”

“There’s absolutely no regulation of what Google does with our material,” said Viramontes, who has authored three published books.

Viramontes called the deal “insane” and scoffed at the $60 compensation as “nothing.”

Many intellectuals at-large — ranging from prominent literary critic Harold Bloom to former House Majority Leader Richard Armey — have voiced their opposition through letters to Judge Chin. Other big names lining up against Google include Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo! and the federal government of Germany, which holds that the settlement “does not fairly represent German authors or publishers.”

The Cornell Library’s letter was a response to this outcry of criticism. University Librarian Kenney backs the settlement because it will “unleash [the] incredible mining [of] huge corpuses of hitherto inaccessible material.”

“Students and faculty will be able to remotely access huge volumes of material,” Kenney said, adding that previous attempts to streamline research through digitization had cost “$50 a book in labor fees…a prohibitive” price tag.

Peter Hirtle, Cornell Library’s senior intellectual properties officer, pointed out some other positive facets of the agreement, including Google’s promise to “give one free license … [to] every public library in the country.”

He thinks that the “deep troubles about the settlement” are effaced, in part at least, by the sheer number of books that will become available to the general public. Google has scanned 10 million books already; the Cornell Library, by comparison, is home to eight million books.

Allowing students to “search through 20 percent of all books” will radically change research, Hirtle said, because students will no longer have to look through the whole book.

Complicating matters even further are the legal rights of books with unknown copyright owners, colloquially known as the “orphan works.” Hirtle posed another potential problem with the agreement: “If a copyright exists but nobody knows whose it is — a son might unknowingly inherit a dead father’s copyright — who should get the royalties from it?”

The current agreement divides the proceeds from the orphan works’ amongst the writers with known copyrights, though Hirtle believes that ethical and legal questions remain.

Cornell was not the only university whose library expressed support for the agreement. The University of Virginia, Stanford University and the Association of Independent California Schools all filed letters backing the agreement, largely for similar reasons.

The University of Virginia’s letter stated that “Google’s plan … would serve the general public in unprecedented ways.”

These competing arguments fall at the feet of Justice Chin, who must wade through thousands of pages of esoteric counterarguments. Chin, who is currently undergoing a nomination process for what was previously Sonia Sotomayor’s Court of Appeals seat, dealt with the Bernie Madoff trial earlier this year.

All parties now look to Chin, on whom the future of research and the past of writing depend. The Cornell Library hopes that, in Kenney’s words, Chin will not “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”