The Fair Use/Fair Dealing Handbook; InfoJustice.org, 3/27/13

Jonathan Band, InfoJustice.org; The Fair Use/Fair Dealing Handbook: "More than 40 countries with over one-third of the world’s population have fair use or fair dealing provisions in their copyright laws. These countries are in all regions of the world and at all levels of development. The broad diffusion of fair use and fair dealing indicates that there is no basis for preventing the more widespread adoption of these doctrines, with the benefits their flexibility brings to authors, publishers, consumers, technology companies, libraries, museums, educational institutions, and governments."

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

The Google Book Search Case: March Madness Edition; Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/5/10

Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education; The Google Book Search Case: March Madness Edition:

"The February 18 fairness hearing on the revised settlement in the Google Books lawsuit has come and gone, and the world now waits for word from Denny Chin, the federal judge in charge of the case. It could be a long wait. At the Association of American Publishers meeting held in Washington this week, there was talk that we might not hear from the judge for a couple of months. (He could issue a ruling anytime, of course.)

One question on the minds of everyone following the settlement is : What happens after the judge rules? Jonathan Band, a specialist in technology law and policy, has created a nifty chart of possible paths the settlement might take, depending on what Judge Chin decides. Called "GBS March Madness: Paths Forward for the Google Books Settlement," the chart lays out a many-branched tree of appeals or litigation, all the way up to the Supreme Court.

In a note, Mr. Band points out that even a chart as complex as his does not lay out all the possible twists and turns the case could still take. "For example, it does not mention stays pending appeals nor whether litigation would proceed as a class action," he writes. And it doesn't talk about why Judge Chin might reject or accept the deal, or whether Congress might step in at some juncture.

"In short, the precise way forward is more difficult to predict than the NCAA tournament," Mr. Band observes."

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/The-Google-Book-Search-Case-/21643/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Unsettled: Questions about the Google Book Search Settlement | Peer to Peer Review; Library Journal, 12/10/09

Barbara Fister, Library Journal; Unsettled: Questions about the Google Book Search Settlement Peer to Peer Review:

"The most striking change is that the agreement covers a much smaller universe of scanned books, only those published in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia or registered in the US copyright office. Jonathan Brand, author of the third update to the aptly-titled Guide to the Perplexed, estimates "perhaps as much as 50% of the titles in the research libraries partnering with Google are not in English; and most of these foreign language titles probably were published outside the U.S. and were not registered with the Copyright Office."

Other issues that remain problematic in this amended settlement were nicely summed up in a series of posts at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Deep Links blog, all of them related to core library values...

At this point I am as ambivalent as ever about Google's extraordinary "moon shot." From the start, I was concerned, as Rory Litwin was, about the transformation of libraries' collections, developed over decades, into a monopolistic commercial venture, one that depends on lowering privacy barriers to function. I was hopeful, back then, that it might establish a new understanding of fair use that would be of benefit to other digitization projects. I didn't foresee the development of a registry that would enable unprecedented exploitation of books—the majority of published books—that linger in an uncertain copyright limbo.

I was then and still remain skeptical that GBS will transform the way most people tap into the knowledge found in books. For scholars who mine vast research libraries for obscure nuggets, it holds promise, and the limitations of poor scanning, inadequate metadata, and now the exclusion of most works in languages other than English are of serious concern. But for the undergraduates I serve, ones who find our academic library of 300,000 volumes intimidating, its sheer size is actually a drawback.

As Ranganathan said, the library is a living organism. I'll leave the Panglossian vision of the universal, final library to others and get back to tending my own garden."

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6711187.html

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

At NYPL, No “Smackdown” This Time As Panel Pushes For Google Book Search Settlement; Publishers Weekly, 7/29/09

Andrew Albanese via Publishers Weekly; At NYPL, No “Smackdown” This Time As Panel Pushes For Google Book Search Settlement:

"In what New York Public Library (NYPL) director David Ferriero called a return to the scene of the “Google smackdown,” the sold-out November 2005 event where the initial lawsuits over Google Book Search were first debated, panelists yesterday took questions from Ferriero and audience members and defended the pending Google Book Search Settlement.

The two-hour panel, "Expanding Access to Books: Implications of the Google Books Settlement Agreement,” featured David Drummond, senior v-p of corporate development & chief legal officer at Google; Richard Sarnoff, co-chairman, Bertelsmann, authors Jim Gleick and Peter Petre, and attorney and library legal advisor Jonathan Band, author of A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement. The panel kicks off a week of events in New York as the settlement enters a critical final month before a September 4 deadline for rightsholders to opt-out or object to the deal."

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6673684.html

OpEd: Editorial: Google Deal or Rip-Off?, Via Library Journal, 12/15/08

OpEd: Via Library Journal: Editorial: Google Deal or Rip-Off?:

"One public access terminal per public library building. Institutional database subscriptions for academic and public libraries that secure once freely available material in a contractual lockbox, which librarians already know too well from costly e-journal and e-reference database deals. No remote access for public libraries without approval from the publisher/author Book Rights Registry, set up to administer the program. And no copying or pasting from that institutional database, though you can print pages for a fee. Of course, you can always purchase the book, too.

Those are just a few of the choice tidbits from the 200-page settlement in the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Authors Guild three-year-old suit against Google, drawn from Jonathan Band's “Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement.” Band's report was commissioned by the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries...

The restrictions were obviously too much for one of the original five Google partners, Harvard University Library (HUL), which criticized the settlement. Robert Darnton, the HUL director, said the deal had “too many potential limitations on access to and use of books” for academia and public libraries and questioned what the price for access would be, given that “the subscription service will have no real competitors.”"

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6618842.html