Conference explores Canadian side of Google book settlement; Financial Post, 5/25/10

Julius Melnitzer, Financial Post; Conference explores Canadian side of Google book settlement:

"The Google book settlement has been controversial, but so far most of the debate has focused on the US. The Centre for Innovation Law and Policy hopes to start correcting this with a one-day conference on Friday, May 28 that will explore the implications of the settlement for Canada. The conference is free but registration is required."

http://business.financialpost.com/2010/05/25/conference-explores-canadian-side-of-google-book-settlement/#ixzz0oziN7vev

Google's digital library faces key hurdles; San Jose Mercury News, 3/7/10

Mike Swift, San Jose Mercury News; Google's digital library faces key hurdles:

"Sometime in the near future, a federal judge will decide whether Google can proceed with its plan to create a digital library and bookstore out of millions of old books scanned from libraries around the world.

Google Book Search has already spawned a class-action lawsuit, and now, a surge of opposition from scholars, consumer advocates and business competitors who claim the plan gives Google too much control over a priceless store of information. The legal issues are complex. But the impact and implications of the plan, which would create a copyright framework for old books that would persist into the 22nd century, could be huge, some say.

"It really is the most important copyright dispute we're currently facing," said James Grimmelmann, a professor at New York Law School and a former Microsoft programmer. "I would say this whole controversy has the potential to really affect how we access all kinds of media, not just old ones, but also new ones."

If Google is successful in rewriting a major area of copyright law through its proposed settlement of the lawsuit, someone else could try something similar for music or photographs. "It's a really interesting way to break a lot of logjams in copyright law," Grimmelmann said. "But are we opening a Pandora's box?""

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14521165

Google Book Search Settlement 2.0: The Latest Scorecard; Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus, 1/29/10

Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus; Google Book Search Settlement 2.0: The Latest Scorecard:

"We hope you enjoyed a holiday break from news of the Google Book Search settlement. A month into the new year, though, it's time to check back in with the case. January 28 was the deadline to file objections to the revised version. Denny Chin, the federal district judge charged with reviewing the settlement, is scheduled to hold a fairness hearing on Settlement 2.0 on February 18th.

Here are some of the latest developments and reactions to catch our eye. If you have come across other useful commentary or reactions, please share those in the comments.

--A group of some 80 professors, led by Pamela Samuelson, a professor of law and information at the University of California at Berkeley, has sent Judge Chin a letter explaining some academic authors' concerns over Settlement 2.0. The letter-signers write that "whatever the outcome of the fairness hearing, we believe strongly that the public good is served by the existence of digital repositories of books, such as the GBS corpus. We feel equally strongly that it would be better for Google not to have a monopoly on a digital database of these books." The letter reiterates many of the points made by Ms. Samuelson et al. in an earlier letter sent to the court. The Daily Californian also reported that Hal Varian, a professor of economics, business, and information at Berkeley, circulated a campus memorandum in response to Ms. Samuelson's most recent letter. "The agreement is not perfect, but I believe it to be a huge improvement over the status quo for authors, publishers, scholars, and the general public," Mr. Varian said in the memo. "In my view it deserves the enthusiastic support of all Berkeley faculty."

--The author Ursula K. Le Guin submitted a petition to the court with the signatures of 367 authors who dislike the proposed deal. "The free and open dissemination of information and of literature, as it exists in our public libraries, can and should exist in the electronic media. All authors hope for that," the petition states. "But we cannot have free and open dissemination of information and literature unless the use of written material continues to be controlled by those who write it or own legitimate right in it. We urge our government and our courts to allow no corporation to circumvent copyright law or dictate the terms of that control."

--On his blog The Laboratorium, Associate Professor James Grimmelmann of New York Law School—who has been bird-dogging the settlement since the beginning—has posted a nice list of "Essential Reading for Settlement Junkies." It features the most interesting filings that came in as the January 28 deadline approached. Highlights: Amazon's brief opposing the revised settlement is "a superbly executed piece of legal advocacy"; AT&T weighs in with a brief that confirms its "intense hatred of Google"; a group of Indian publishers objects too, saying that "while the scope of the proposed revised settlement has been narrowed by excluding India, it continues to provide Google with sweeping rights to exploit works of Indian authors/publishers under copyright protection without their express permission/consent."

--the British government declined to object, noting that "the UK Publishers Association strongly supports the revised settlement."

--The Open Book Alliance, whose memberhip includes GBS opponents Amazon.com, Microsoft, and the Internet Alliance, surprised no one by filing a friend-of-the-court brief opposing Settlement 2.0. "What one of Google's founders hailed last fall in the pages of The New York Times as 'A Library to Last Forever,' a modern-day equivalent of the Library at Alexandria, now reveals itself as more likely a sham and a fraud on the public," the alliance writes in one of the more rhetorically dramatic filings in the case.

--Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor of Creative Commons fame, published a long essay in The New Republic about what he sees as the urgent need to redraft U.S. copyright law. Otherwise, he fears, "we are about to make a catastrophic cultural mistake." For those short on time—or driven crazy by TNR's eye-taxing fonts—TechCrunch boils down Mr. Lessig's long argument to its essence here. See also Mr. Grimmelmann's Laboratorium analysis of Mr. Lessig's essay and reactions/rebuttals in the comments there."

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Google-Book-Search-Settlement/20939/

James Grimmelmann Dec. 2nd Talk at Drexel University

James Grimmelmann Dec. 2nd Talk at Drexel University, "The Google Books Settlement: Books, Computers, and the Law":

Date: 12/2/2009
Start Time: 2:00 PM
Location: Rush Building, Room 014

Joint lecture: "The Google Books Settlement: Books, Computers, and the Law” by James Grimmelmann

The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology, and the Earle Mack School of Law will co-sponsor the lecture "The Google Books Settlement: Books, Computers, and the Law” by James Grimmelmann on Wednesday, December 2, 2009, at 2 p.m. in room 014, Rush Building (30 N. 33rd Street).Mr. Grimmelmann will review the history of the Google Books project, lawsuit, and proposed settlement, then discuss the questions it raises for information policy and the rule of law. These touch on issues of copyright, antitrust, privacy, free speech, and civil procedure, and are connected to bigger themes in public policy. He is an Associate Professor at New York Law School and a member of its Institute for Information Law and Policy.

Background: http://www.nyls.edu/centers/harlan_scholar_centers/institute_for_information_law_and_policy/events/d_is_for_digitize/programhttp://thepublicindex.org/

http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/home/about/calendar/details/?event=1569

Samuelson Says Google Book Search Settlement Doesn’t Fully Reflect “Public Trust Responsibilities”; New York Times, 10/13/09

Norman Oder, New York Times; Samuelson Says Google Book Search Settlement Doesn’t Fully Reflect “Public Trust Responsibilities”:

"“You create a public good this substantial, guess what: public trust responsibilities come with it.” So said University of California law professor Pamela Samuelson Friday during a keynote lunch at the D is for Digitize conference, held at New York Law School.

And Google and the plaintiffs, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, have not responded sufficiently, she said, noting concerns about price-gouging for institutional subscriptions and user privacy. With Samuelson on the dais was Paul Courant, the University of Michigan library dean, a Ph.D economist and self-described “faux librarian,”whose library was the first to agree to have its works scanned by Google and supports the project.

“I think the public trust responsibilities are and ought to be widely shared,” Courant said. His bottom line: the benefits of the deal are worth the costs."

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6701727.html?desc=topstory

Google Working to Revise Digital Books Settlement; New York Times, 9/21/09

Miguel Helft, New York Times; Google Working to Revise Digital Books Settlement:

"Legal experts say the new round of discussions, and the government’s intervention, are almost certain to delay an agreement that Google and the other parties were eager to see ratified quickly.

“The news out of this is that there are frantic negotiations going on in back rooms right now,” said James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, which raised antitrust and other objections to the settlement. “The parties are scared enough to be talking seriously about changes, with each other and the government. The government is being the stern parent making them do it.”...

The Justice Department’s filing on Friday, echoing other critics, said that the settlement could give Google a virtually exclusive license to millions of out-of-print “orphan books,” whose rights holders were unknown or cannot be found, making it impossible for anyone else to build a comparable digital library; the interests of some class members, including authors of orphan works and foreign authors, might not have been adequately represented; and the efforts to notify class members about the settlement might have been inadequate.

But unlike some of the more strident opponents, who have argued that the settlement is so flawed that it must be rejected, the Justice Department said it hoped the accord could be fixed so that its benefits — most notable the unprecedented access to millions of out-of-print books it would offer — could be achieved. And it said the parties appeared willing to make changes to address such concerns."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/technology/internet/21google.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=google&st=cse

Life in a Google Book Search World; Inside Higher Ed, 8/12/09

Inside Higher Ed; Life in a Google Book Search World:

While the settlement gives lawyers and scholars fodder for debating the intricacies of often arcane antitrust law provisions, its real-world implications for university research libraries are already apparent, according to Jonathan Band, legal counsel for the Library Copyright Alliance, which represents thousands of libraries in three major associations. Speaking at a panel on the Google settlement at the National Press Club here Tuesday, Band said it is obvious that any library that hopes to remain competitive will be forced to purchase an institutional subscription from Google Book Search.

“[The university’s] faculty will insist upon it,” he said. “Its students will insist upon it.”

“There’s a product they have to have, and in essence there’s one supplier,” Band added.

The cost of institutional subscriptions, which will last for a limited period before renewal is necessary, will differ across institutions based in part on enrollment numbers, according to the settlement. Libraries that purchase subscription services will gain access to the full text of Google’s entire library, which now contains more than 7 million books. The search engine’s immodest goal from the outset, however, has been to eventually put the world’s written history at the public’s fingertips.

For all the concerns that Google’s Book Search provokes, there seems little argument that the basic concept -- broad-based access to knowledge -- serves an inherent good. Researchers are unsurprisingly excited by the possibilities presented by a searchable full-text database of obscure, forgotten works. But it is Google’s potential hold on those obscure works that most worries James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School.

Grimmelmann is particularly concerned about the Google settlement’s treatment of so-called “orphan” works, a term used to describe books for whom the copyright owner may be unknown or nonexistent. Since copyright endures for 70 years beyond an author’s death, it's possible that an author’s grandchild or other relative may unknowingly hold a copyright, making it practically impossible to track him or her down.

Under the settlement, Google is permitted to presume it has the consent of any as-yet-undiscovered copyright owner -- insulating the company from costly legal challenges that another would-be book digitizer might invoke when scanning orphan works.
In the context of competition, the orphan works are “the thing [Google has] that no competitor could hope to match,” Grimmelmann said.

Grimmelmann’s concerns about orphan works are misguided and overblown, according to David Balto, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Orphan” status is only bestowed upon books for which publishers see no viable market, and whose “parents” are “indifferent,” he said. Essentially, such works have little value, and therefore hardly give Google an advantage, Balto said.

While Grimmelmann readily praised the potential benefit of Google’s digitization project, he said the project’s social good does not erase his concerns about Google’s unfair advantage.

“We wouldn’t say a monopolist should be excused of particular acts of monopoly because it does other good things,” he said."

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/12/google

Lawyer and Author Adds His Objections to Settling the Google Book Lawsuit; New York Times, 8/19/09

Miguel Helft and Motoko Rich via New York Times; Lawyer and Author Adds His Objections to Settling the Google Book Lawsuit:

"In the latest objection, Scott E. Gant, an author and partner at Boies Schiller & Flexner, a prominent Washington law firm, plans to file a sweeping opposition to the settlement on Wednesday urging the court to reject it.

“This is a predominantly commercial transaction and one that should be undertaken through the normal commercial process, which is negotiation and informed consent,” Mr. Gant said in an interview. Google and its partners are “trying to ram this through so that millions of copyright holders will have no idea that this is happening.”

Unlike most previous objections to the project, which focused on policy issues and recommended modifications to the settlement, Mr. Gant argues that the agreement, which gives Google commercial rights to millions of books without having to negotiate for them individually, amounts to an abuse of the class-action process. He also contends that it does not sufficiently compensate authors and does not adequately notify and represent all the authors affected.

Legal experts, who had not seen the filing but heard a description of it, said it could be the most direct attack on the agreement so far.

“It may be the most fundamental challenge to the settlement yet,” said James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, a critic of the agreement whose blog tracks filings and commentary related to it...

“I opted out of the settlement just on ornery grounds,” said Christopher Buckley, author of “Thank You for Smoking” and “Losing Mum and Pup,” a memoir. He said he was suspicious of the claims by Google and the Authors Guild that the settlement would help breathe new life into out-of-print works. “I think books either stay in print or don’t pretty much on their own,” he said.

He said he was skeptical that the agreement was increasing the public good. “Whenever I hear capitalism proclaiming noble motives,” he said, “something makes me check my wallet.” "

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/technology/internet/19google.html

The Restless Giant (Lawsuit); James Grimmelmann's Laboratorium Blog, 7/23/09

James Grimmelmann's Laboratorium Blog; The Restless Giant (Lawsuit):

"The Google Book Search case appears to be gradually waking from its long summers’ nap. Objections and comments, which had slowed to a crawl in June and July, have started to pick up again...

There’s also been a sudden spike of activity on the policy front. Three essays of note have crossed my radar.

First, the EFF launched today a privacy campaign targeted at Google, asking it to commit to reader privacy protections as part of implementing the settlement. They’ve sent a letter to Google’s Eric Schmidt laying out their concern...

Second, Bernard Lang, a French computer scientist with an interest in digital copyright, has written a paper on the settlement from an international perspective, with special emphasis on orphan works. He assesses the settlement against the “three-step test” for assessing whether national exceptions and limitations on copyright are permissible under international copyright treaties...

Third, David Balto, a fellow at the Center for America Progress and a prominent antitrust attorney, has a long post at the American Constitution Society’s blog responding to my Issue Brief on the settlement. He critiques my analysis of the antitrust risks and praises the settlement".

http://laboratorium.net/archive/2009/07/23/the_restless_giant_lawsuit

Critics: Google Book Deal a Monopoly, Privacy Debacle; Wired.com, 6/2/09

Ryan Singel via Wired.com; Critics: Google Book Deal a Monopoly, Privacy Debacle:

"Google set out to digitize the world’s books in 2003, got sued for its trouble in 2005 by publishers and authors wanting to make money from the efforts, and in 2007 came to a proposed settlement that gives Google the rights to scan, index, display and even sell millions of books that are in copyright. So far its Google Book Search program has digitized around 10 million books from the some of the nation’s most prestigious university libraries, but only small portions of most in-copyright books are shown online currently.

(Learn more with Wired.com’s Google Book Search Settlement FAQ.)

Even the deal’s critics — such as New York University professor James Grimmelmann — admit that the deal sounds great: Books in copyright but out-of-print become available for viewing and purchase by the public, and researchers and students at universities will get access to the full technology.

But Grimmelmann, whose Google Book Search research has been funded by Microsoft, says that the Google deal gives it exclusive rights to books that are in copyright whose authors can’t be found — so-called orphan works — and that any competitor who wants to try the same project could get sued for huge sums of money.

That makes a monopoly, Grimmelmann told conference goers at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington, D.C. Tuesday."

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/google_books/

New York Law School to Launch Public Interest Book Search Initiative Project; New York Law School Press Release, 5/6/09

Via New York Law School Press Release; New York Law School to Launch Public Interest Book Search Initiative Project to Be Led by Recognized Expert on Google Book Lawsuit:

"New York Law School today announced the launch of the Public Interest Book Search Initiative, a new program developed to foster public discussion about the law and policy of digitizing books, making them searchable, and distributing them online.

The new initiative reinforces New York Law School's leading role in the academic study of the future of publishing and will be led by Professor James Grimmelmann, a recognized expert on copyright law and the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit. Professor Grimmelmann is often quoted in the media about the lawsuit, and his article "How to Fix the Google Book Search Settlement" is the most frequently cited and discussed analysis of the proposed settlement...

The key components of the Public Interest Book Search Initiative are: a Web site for discussion of the proposed settlement, an open-source amicus brief, and a conference on the settlement."

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/05/prweb2392184.htm