Still more about the GBS decision
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. Continue reading
Darnton on Google Books Decision
Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library and leader of the movement to establish a digital public library of america, writes about the Google Books Settlement decision:
- A Digital Library Better Than Google's, by ROBERT DARNTON, New York Times (March 23, 2011). ... the settlement didn’t do what settlements are supposed to do, like correct an alleged infringement of copyright, or provide damages for past incidents; instead it seemed to determine the way the digital world of books would evolve in the future. ...Perhaps Google itself could be enlisted to the cause of the digital public library. It has scanned about 15 million books; two million of that total are in the public domain and could be turned over to the library as the foundation of its collection. The company would lose nothing by this generosity, and might win admiration for its good deed. ...only a digital public library will provide readers with what they require to face the challenges of the 21st century -- a vast collection of resources that can be tapped, free of charge, by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Continue reading
More on GBS
Here is another good post on the Google Book Settlement decision from IHE. Kolowich quotes Pamela Samuelson, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Joseph Esposito, John Wilkin, and others.
- Please Refine Your Search Terms, by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed (March 23, 2011). "The Google Book Search initiative envisioned in the [agreement] is not a library," the judge wrote in another footnote, quoting Samuelson directly. "It is instead a complex and large-scale commercial enterprise in which Google -- and Google alone -- will obtain a license to sell millions of books for decades to come."
Data.gov and other programs slated to die
Sunlight reports on the House bill that will slash funding for major government data sharing and transparency projects. Noting that the funding for these programs is only a few million dollars, Daniel Shuman says, "The returns from these e-government initiatives in terms of transparency are priceless."
- Budget Technopocalypse: Proposed Congressional Budgets Slash Funding for Data Transparency, by Daniel Schuman, Sunlight Foundation Blog (March 23, 2011). Data.gov, USASpending.gov, and other Obama tech innovations face virtual extinction if the FY 2011 budget bill passed by the House of Representatives in February or considered by the Senate in March becomes law.
The Google Books Settlement
The best analysis I have read so far of the court's decision on the Google Books Settlement is from Barbara Fister:
- March Madness: Judge Denny Chin Rejects the Google Settement, by Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed (March 23, 2011) ...The judge also gave a nod toward the Department of Justice's complaint that the class action took what was a copyright complaint and turned it into a proposal for a profitable and far-reaching business endeavor. The Google project would cease being a search engine and instead become a retail platform; not a virtual library, but a bookstore, selling books that could not legally be bought from any other vendor ...Thanks to the continual erosion of the public domain through repeated copyright extensions, we've made a large portion of our cultural history virtually inaccessible. Congress, which is constitutionally authorized to make copyright decisions, has failed to make reasonable arrangements to let those books be used to "promote the progress of science and useful arts."