A lot more good commentary and analysis is coming out about the recent Google Books Settlement decision. Here are a few not-to-be-missed items:
- Research Libraries See Google Decision as Just a Bump on the Road to Widespread Digital Access, By Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education (March 23, 2011).
[T]he Association of Research Libraries …did not take a pro or con stance on the proposed settlement. Along with the American Library Association and the Association of College and Research Libraries, it did raise privacy and antitrust concerns about it and questioned whether academic libraries’ interests were adequately represented.
- A Copyright Expert Who Spoke Up for Academic Authors Offers Insights on the Google Books Ruling [interview with Pamela Samuelson] by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education (March 23, 2011).
The thing that surprised me about the opinion was that he took seriously the issues about whether the Authors Guild and some of its members had adequately represented the interests of all authors, including academic authors and foreign authors…. Academic authors, on average, would prefer open access. Whereas the guild and its members, understandably, want to do profit maximization.
…as we all know, Google basically also wants to know everything that we look at and everything that we read, and they would be engaged in profiling and serving up ads. There were virtually no privacy guarantees for users in the settlement agreement.
- Google Book Search rejected: why not try fair use instead?, by Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing (Mar 23, 2011).
…what Google had originally set out to do — index all the books, in the same way that it indexes all the web-pages — is arguably fair use, and Google could have mounted a fair use defense against the Authors Guild claim. A victory there would have paved the way for a competitive landscape of multiple search engines indexing books under the same legal theory.
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