Legal arguments pan, praise Google's book deal; Associated Press, 9/8/09

Michael Liedtke via Associated Press; Legal arguments pan, praise Google's book deal:

"Tuesday's legal sparring came on the deadline for written arguments about a $125 million settlement that would entrust Google with a digital database containing millions of copyright-protected books, including titles no longer being published.

But at least one more key document is expected before U.S. District Judge Denny Chin holds an Oct. 7 hearing in New York to review the settlement. The Justice Department has until Sept. 18 to file its brief, which may provide some inkling on whether antitrust regulators have determined if the deal would hurt competition.

The settlement, reached last October, has raised the specter of Google becoming even more powerful than it already has become as the owner of the Internet's most popular search engine and most lucrative advertising network.

Those concerns represented the crux of a 32-page brief written by Silicon Valley attorney Gary Reback, who helped the Justice Department pursue an antitrust case against Microsoft's bundling of personal computer software in the 1990s.

Reback filed the brief Tuesday on behalf of the Open Book Alliance, which includes Microsoft, Yahoo, Internet bookseller Amazon.com Inc., other companies and nonprofit organizations. Microsoft and Yahoo, which compete with Google in search, also filed separate arguments; Amazon submitted its protest last week.

The alliance contends Google conspired with the author and publishing groups that sued the Mountain View-based company to make it more difficult for competitors to create similar indexes of digital books. The alliance contends that competitive barriers would empower Google, authors and publishers to the raise prices of digital books well above the current standard of about $10 per volume.

"The publishing industry desperately wants to raise the retail price point for digital books," Reback wrote for the alliance. "The book settlement permits them to achieve that by working with Google.""

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gdFC6FPR3nJfAKfpAUEEsmkZjqWAD9AJEG6O2

Librarians apply scrutiny to Google Books at Berkeley con; ZDNet Government, 8/27/09

Richard Koman via ZDNet Government; Librarians apply scrutiny to Google Books at Berkeley con:

"If you’re in the Bay Area and you want a full day of wonky debate, check out UC Berkeley’s Google Books Conference. It features panels on how the Google Books settlement affect data mining, privacy, information quality and public access.

The conference comes hard on the heels of the formation of the Open Book Alliance, an organization driven by the Internet Archive and including Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as library and small publishing groups among its members. Most of the speakers are opposed to the deal but Google’s Tom [sic] Clancy will be there to make the company’s argument....

But if Google is the last library, as Berkeley linguist Geoff Nunberg says, it’s a pretty bad one. That means serious library science must be applied to the online collection before we should outsource the history of human (or at least Western) knowledge to Google:

Google Book Search is almost laughably unusable for serious research, UC Berkeley’s Nunberg said. For example, he pointed out that the Charles Dickens classic “A Tale of Two Cities” is listed in Google Book Search as having been published in 1800; Dickens was born in 1812."

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=5309

Library Organizations Urge DoJ To Take Proactive Role in Google Book Search Settlement; Library Journal, 8/6/09

Norman Oder via Library Journal; Library Organizations Urge DoJ To Take Proactive Role in Google Book Search Settlement:

Groups express concerns about pricing, composition of Book Rights Registry:

"Letter follows up on May meeting.

DoJ should treat settlement as consent decree.

OCA asks Google to request delay in hearing."

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6675219.html

Google and the libraries, International Herald Tribune, 12/5/08

OpEd: Via International Herald Tribune: Google and the libraries:

"In 2004, Google signed a deal with five major research libraries to digitize all the books in their collections. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and we're excited to be working with libraries to help make this mission a reality" proclaimed company cofounder Larry Page. It looked like an encouraging first step toward a world in which all knowledge was online, all the time.

Not everyone was so enthralled with this beatific vision of the Future According to Google.

Authors had the temerity to insist they be paid for their digitized content, which was going to be used to sell Google ads, or, down the road, be loaded into a possible Google Reader. The Authors Guild sued, and eventually settled with Google, resulting in a complicated agreement about royalty payments that awaits the approval of a judge.

Libraries excluded from the Google project wondered where they would fit in. The words "Free to All" are etched in stone above the Boston Public Library, but last I checked, those words do not appear on the fuselages of the Boeings and Gulfstreams owned by Google founders Page and Sergey Brin.

Google executives sound like they are doing the world an immense favor by digitizing books, rarely mentioning that they are in business to sell stuff, not give it away...

In a heated philippic, "Free Our Libraries!" posted on the Web site of the Boston Library Consortium, Richard Johnson, an adviser to the Association of Research Libraries, decries the "momentous, ill-considered shift...that threatens to limit the public rights in the collections assembled and maintained, often at public expense, in libraries around the globe."

"Companies are paying nothing for access to the crown jewels," Johnson writes. "We may awaken one day to find that our digital heritage has become private property rather than a public good."

Librarians of the world, unite! You have everything to lose: your books."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/05/opinion/edbeam.php