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
Showing posts with label one terminal in public libraries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label one terminal in public libraries. Show all posts
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Google’s Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged, The New York Times, 4/3/09
The New York Times; Google’s Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged:
"The dusty stacks of the nation’s great university and research libraries are full of orphans — books that the author and publisher have essentially abandoned. They are out of print, and while they remain under copyright, the rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.
Now millions of orphan books may get a new legal guardian. Google has been scanning the pages of those books and others as part of its plan to bring a digital library and bookstore, unprecedented in scope, to computer screens across the United States.
But a growing chorus is complaining that a far-reaching settlement of a suit brought against Google by publishers and authors is about to grant the company too much power over orphan works...
The settlement, “takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,” said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. “Google will be a monopoly.”...
Most of the critics, which include copyright specialists, antitrust scholars and some librarians, agree that the public will benefit...
“They are doing an end run around the legislative process,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Open Content Alliance, which is working to build a digital library with few restrictions.
Opposition to the 134-page agreement, which the parties announced in October, has been building slowly as its implications have become clearer. Groups that plan to raise concerns with the court include the American Library Association, the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and a group of lawyers led by Prof. Charles R. Nesson of Harvard Law School. It is not clear that any group will oppose the settlement outright.
These critics say the settlement, which is subject to court approval, will give Google virtually exclusive rights to publish the books online and to profit from them. Some academics and public interest groups plan to file legal briefs objecting to this and other parts of the settlement in coming weeks, before a review by a federal judge in June...
The settlement, which covers all books protected by copyright in the United States, allows Google to vastly expand what it can do with digital copies of books, whether they are orphans or not."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/technology/internet/04books.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=google%20book&st=cse
"The dusty stacks of the nation’s great university and research libraries are full of orphans — books that the author and publisher have essentially abandoned. They are out of print, and while they remain under copyright, the rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.
Now millions of orphan books may get a new legal guardian. Google has been scanning the pages of those books and others as part of its plan to bring a digital library and bookstore, unprecedented in scope, to computer screens across the United States.
But a growing chorus is complaining that a far-reaching settlement of a suit brought against Google by publishers and authors is about to grant the company too much power over orphan works...
The settlement, “takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,” said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. “Google will be a monopoly.”...
Most of the critics, which include copyright specialists, antitrust scholars and some librarians, agree that the public will benefit...
“They are doing an end run around the legislative process,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Open Content Alliance, which is working to build a digital library with few restrictions.
Opposition to the 134-page agreement, which the parties announced in October, has been building slowly as its implications have become clearer. Groups that plan to raise concerns with the court include the American Library Association, the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and a group of lawyers led by Prof. Charles R. Nesson of Harvard Law School. It is not clear that any group will oppose the settlement outright.
These critics say the settlement, which is subject to court approval, will give Google virtually exclusive rights to publish the books online and to profit from them. Some academics and public interest groups plan to file legal briefs objecting to this and other parts of the settlement in coming weeks, before a review by a federal judge in June...
The settlement, which covers all books protected by copyright in the United States, allows Google to vastly expand what it can do with digital copies of books, whether they are orphans or not."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/technology/internet/04books.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=google%20book&st=cse
Friday, March 27, 2009
At Columbia Conference, Harvard’s Darnton Asks: Is Google the Elsevier of the Future?, Library Journal, 3/18/09
Via Library Journal: At Columbia Conference, Harvard’s Darnton Asks: Is Google the Elsevier of the Future?:
"Is the public’s interest in books at risk with the pending Google Book Search Settlement? That was one of many issues addressed at an all-day conference on the settlement, held on March 13 at Columbia University.
In the final panel of the day, which addressed public interest issues, Google’s Alexander Macgillivray, associate general counsel for products and intellectual property, responded a bit pugnaciously...He suggested that “a special type of researcher,” such as automated translation experts, would also benefit enormously from the database, that “the long term effects of those researchers having access to this corpus” could even lead “to more peace in the world,” and that the database would add significantly to access to books by disabled people, citing an endorsement from the National Federation of the Blind...
“The downside has to do with the danger of monopoly,” he [Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton] said, adding that, while not all monopolies are bad, the danger comes in the abuse of power, notably via monopoly pricing. “So we have a situation where Google can really ratchet up prices, and that’s what really worries me,” he said. “There’s no real authority to enforce fair pricing… I’m worried that Google will be the Elsevier of the future, but magnified by a hundred times.” Without a mechanism to police pricing, he warned, “it’s going to ruin libraries.”...He called the provision of one terminal in public libraries “one of the weakest provisions,” and predicted chaos in a large urban public library. Google, meanwhile, has said it would consider more than one terminal in larger libraries.
Another solution?
Is Congressional intervention on the public’s behalf a possibility? Does the settlement, for example, make it harder, or perhaps easier to go to Congress for authorization to create a national digital library? “I hate to say this, I don’t think it’s possible,” Darnton said. “We’ve got this settlement, and if it’s not modified now, it’s going to shape the world of digital information for the near future, maybe the far future.”"
http://www.libraryjournal.com/CA6645344.html
"Is the public’s interest in books at risk with the pending Google Book Search Settlement? That was one of many issues addressed at an all-day conference on the settlement, held on March 13 at Columbia University.
In the final panel of the day, which addressed public interest issues, Google’s Alexander Macgillivray, associate general counsel for products and intellectual property, responded a bit pugnaciously...He suggested that “a special type of researcher,” such as automated translation experts, would also benefit enormously from the database, that “the long term effects of those researchers having access to this corpus” could even lead “to more peace in the world,” and that the database would add significantly to access to books by disabled people, citing an endorsement from the National Federation of the Blind...
“The downside has to do with the danger of monopoly,” he [Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton] said, adding that, while not all monopolies are bad, the danger comes in the abuse of power, notably via monopoly pricing. “So we have a situation where Google can really ratchet up prices, and that’s what really worries me,” he said. “There’s no real authority to enforce fair pricing… I’m worried that Google will be the Elsevier of the future, but magnified by a hundred times.” Without a mechanism to police pricing, he warned, “it’s going to ruin libraries.”...He called the provision of one terminal in public libraries “one of the weakest provisions,” and predicted chaos in a large urban public library. Google, meanwhile, has said it would consider more than one terminal in larger libraries.
Another solution?
Is Congressional intervention on the public’s behalf a possibility? Does the settlement, for example, make it harder, or perhaps easier to go to Congress for authorization to create a national digital library? “I hate to say this, I don’t think it’s possible,” Darnton said. “We’ve got this settlement, and if it’s not modified now, it’s going to shape the world of digital information for the near future, maybe the far future.”"
http://www.libraryjournal.com/CA6645344.html
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