Pamela Samuelson on "The Audacity of the Google Book Search Settlement"

In "The Audacity of the Google Book Search Settlement," noted copyright expert Pamela Samuelson examines the Google Book Search Settlement.

Here's an excerpt:

However, much larger questions call into question whether the settlement should be approved. One is whether the Authors Guild and AAP fairly represented the interests of all authors and publishers of in-copyright books during the negotiations that led up to the settlement agreement. A second is whether going forward, they and the newly created Registry to which they will give birth will fairly represent the interests of those on whose behalf the Registry will be receiving revenues from Google.

ACRL, ALA, ARL Submit Letter to Justice's Antitrust Division about Google Book Search Settlement

ACRL, ALA, ARL have submitted a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division about the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement.

Here's an excerpt from the press release :

The American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) sent a letter to William Cavanaugh, Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) Antitrust Division yesterday, requesting the Division to advise the court presiding over the Google Book Settlement to supervise the implementation of the settlement closely, particularly the pricing of institutional subscriptions and the selection of the Book Rights Registry board members.

The letter, which was sent following a meeting the library groups had with the Antitrust Division, also recommended that the Division itself actively monitor the parties' compliance with the settlement's provisions.

In particular, the library groups urged the Division to ask the court to review pricing of institutional subscriptions whenever the Division concludes that the prices do not meet the economic objectives set forth in the settlement. In order to evaluate the price of an institutional subscription, the groups believe the Division should have access to all relevant price information from Google and the Registry.

The library associations assert that the Division should ask the court to review any refusal by the Registry to license copyrights in books on the same terms available to Google and to also review the selection process for the Registry Board to ensure the interests of all rightsholders are considered.

Interview with Maria Bonn, Director of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office

In “Turning Out-of-Copyright Books into Gold: An Interview with University of Michigan’s Maria Bonn,” Maria Bonn, Director of the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan Library, discusses Michigan’s recent decision to offer print-on-demand paperback editions of over 400,000 digitized books via BookSurge and Amazon.

EFF Releases Letter to Google about Reader Privacy and Google Book Search

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a letter to Google about reader privacy and Google Book Search.

Here's an excerpt:

  1. Protection Against Disclosure: Readers should be able to use Google books without worrying that the government or a third party is reading over their shoulder. Google needs to promise that it will protect reader records by responding only to properly-issued warrants from law enforcement and court orders from third parties. It also must promise that it will let readers know if anyone has demanded access to information about them.
  2. Limited Tracking: Just as readers can anonymously browse books in a library or bookstore, they should also be able to search, browse, and preview Google books without being forced to register or provide any personal information to Google. And for any of its Google Book Search services, Google must not keep logging information longer than 30 days. Google should also not link any information it collects about reader use of Google Book Search to that reader’s usage of any other Google services without specific, affirmative consent.
  3. User Control: Readers should have complete control of their purchases and purchasing data. Readers should be able to delete their records and have extensive permissions controls for their "bookshelves" or any other reading displays to prevent others from seeing their reading activities. Readers should be able to “give” books to anyone, including to themselves, without tracking. Google also should not reveal any information about Google book use to credit card processors or any other third parties.
  4. User Transparency: Readers should know what information is being collected and maintained about them and when and why reader information has been disclosed. Google needs to develop a robust, enforceable privacy policy and publish the number and type of demands for reader information that are received on an annual basis.

Read more about it at "Don't Let Google Close the Book on Reader Privacy!."

University of Michigan to Offer Print-on-Demand Editions of Thousands of Public Domain Books via BookSurge

The University of Michigan will offer print-on-demand editions of thousands of public domain books via BookSurge for between $10 to about $45.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The agreement gives the public a unique opportunity to buy reprints of a wide range of titles in the U-M Library for as little as a few dollars. As individual copies are sold on Amazon.com, BookSurge will print and bind the books in soft-cover form.

"This agreement means that titles that have been generally unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time," said Paul N. Courant, U-M librarian and dean of libraries.

"The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitized," Courant said. "We are very excited to be offering this service as a new way to increase access to the rich collections of the university library."

Maria Bonn, director of the U-M Library's scholarly publishing office, said the reprint program includes both books digitized by the U-M and those digitized through the U-M's partnership with Google. The initial offering on Amazon will include more than 400,000 titles in more than 200 languages ranging from Acoli to Zulu.

All of the books being offered on Amazon through BookSurge are titles that remain available in their original form at the U-M Library. The U-M has been offering a limited number of titles for reprint on demand with BookSurge and other distribution partners for the past five years. A reprint "best seller" might sell 100 copies, Bonn said.

The U-M will set the list price of each book. The agreement calls for a sharing of revenue between BookSurge and the university.

"Antitrust and the Google Books Settlement: The Problem of Simultaneity"

Eric M. Fraser of the University of Chicago Law School has self-archived "Antitrust and the Google Books Settlement: The Problem of Simultaneity" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

Google Books represents the latest attempt at the centuries-old goal to build a universal library. In 2004, Google started scanning books from libraries around the world. Although it made copyright licensing agreements with some publishers, it did not obtain permission from each rights-holder before scanning, indexing, and displaying portions of books from the stacks of libraries. Unsurprisingly, authors and publishers sued for copyright violations. Google settled the class action lawsuit in a sweeping agreement that has raised suspicion from librarians, users, and the government. In this paper, I analyze the antitrust and competition issues in the settlement agreement. I find that the simultaneous aspects of agreements and pricing pose serious antitrust problems. The settlement effectively gives Google simultaneous agreements with virtually all the rights-holders to in-copyright American books. It also requires that Google set prices for books simultaneously. In a competitive market, both agreements and pricing would occur independently. Under current law, however, no potential competitor can make agreements with the rights-holders to orphan works. The simultaneity, therefore, concentrates pricing power, leading to cartel pricing (a problem under § 1 of the Sherman Act) and monopolization (a § 2 problem).

Mass Digitisation: The IMPACT Project

Fifteen institutions from Europe and the UK have launched the IMPACT project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Feeding into the EU's i2010 vision to significantly improve access to Europe's cultural heritage, the British Library and the University of Salford have teamed up with a group of 15 institutions from across the continent as part of the four-year IMPACT project—IMProving Access to Text—to remove the barriers that stand in the way of the mass digitisation of the European cultural heritage.

Led by the National Library of the Netherlands, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the IMPACT project aims to share expertise from across Europe and establish international best practice guidelines with a view to speeding up, standardising and enhancing the quality of mass digitisation through establishing a Centre of Competence for text based digitisation. As one of the main participants, the British Library has taken the lead on one of IMPACT's four sub-projects, establishing the operational context of the work carried out by contributors to the project.

Mass digitisation has become one of the most prominent issues in the library world over the last 5 years, with a number of experienced libraries in Europe already scanning millions of pages each year. To help establish some standardisation over the course of the project, the British Library's team will lead work on a set of 'Decision Support Tools' in an effort to focus on practical implementation support, providing guidance on digitisation workflow, the capturing of material and the organisation of metadata based on the real world experiences of project partners. These measures, announced at the first IMPACT conference in April will help ensure new material can be digitised successfully and feed into existing workflows. . . .

With extensive experience working with the digitisation of historic material, the British Library has also been working closely with technical experts at the internationally distinguished Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (PRImA) research group, University of Salford, exploring methods of improving Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for use in the digitisation of less standardised material. OCR technology was absolutely vital for the delivery of the Library's recent newspaper digitisation project of 19th Century UK newspapers (http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs), allowing the text to be fully searchable, but the current technology has it limitations. . . .

Through collaboration IMPACT has already established methods for overcoming issues with geometric correction, border removal and binarisation, and is looking at examples of best practice from around the world, such as the Australian Newspaper Digitisation project's cutting edge application of collaborative user generated corrections, to increase resource discovery success for historic mass digitisation.

Oxford University Press Backs Google Book Search Settlement

In "Saving Texts From Oblivion: Oxford U. Press on the Google Book Settlement," Tim Barton, President of Oxford University Press, discusses the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement.

In conclusion. he states:

So we at Oxford University Press support the settlement, even as we recognize its imperfections and want it made better. As Voltaire said, "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," the perfect is the enemy of the good. Let us not waste an opportunity to create so much good. Let us work together to solve the imperfections of the settlement. Let us work together to give students, scholars, and readers access to the written wisdom of previous generations. Let us keep those minds alive.

Google Book Search Bibliography, Version 4

Version 4 of the Google Book Search Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship.

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

Google Book Search Settlement: Interview with Michael Healy, Expected Executive Director of the Book Rights Registry

The Copyright Clearance Center has released an interview with Michael Healy, expected Executive Director of the Book Rights Registry (digital audio of the interview is also available). The Book Rights Registry will be established as part of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement.

Here's an excerpt:

And let’s be clear, what we’ll be building here is a remarkable and unique resource, the like of which has not been seen in the industry before, which is a very comprehensive data set, which links publications back to works around which those publications are clustered. And then, you’ll have those works and publications linked for the very first time to comprehensive metadata records about rights holders, who owns what. Then, layer on top of that again, the opportunity that the settlement gives authors and publishers to express what Google and others do with these digitized books, the display rights, the pricing, etc. Then, you have a very complex mix of data sets, which need to interoperate successfully for the Registry to succeed. And I think that highlights an important point of this settlement, which we may come on and talk about later when we discuss the benefits, but it is important to emphasize that the Registry will be a vehicle through which—and the settlement document underpins this—the Registry will be a vehicle through which rights holders can exercise control on the use made by Google and others of these digitized works.

Read more about it at "Authors Guild/AAP/Google Settlement Gives Authors, Publishers 'Unprecedented. . . Control' Over Their Copyrights."

A Guide for the Perplexed Part II: The Amended Google-Michigan Agreement

The American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of College and Research Libraries have released A Guide for the Perplexed Part II: The Amended Google-Michigan Agreement.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The University of Michigan, one of the original participating libraries in the Google Book project, recently entered into an amended agreement that will govern the relationship between Google and Michigan if the proposed Google Book Search settlement is approved by the judge.

Jonathan Band, author of "A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement," has provided a concise description of the Google-Michigan amended terms. The document highlights some rights and responsibilities of participating libraries, including the following:

  • Michigan and any partner library can initiate a review of the pricing of the institutional subscription to determine whether the price properly meets the objectives set forth in the settlement agreement.

  • Google must provide to partner libraries information on books, such as whether Google is treating the book as in the public domain and whether a book is being excluded from any display uses for editorial or non-editorial reasons.

  • Google will provide Michigan with a free institutional subscription for at least 25 years.

  • Michigan is permitted to provide digital copies of the public domain books to academic institutions and research or public libraries for non-commercial research, scholarly, or academic purposes, as long as the library uses reasonable efforts to prevent bulk downloads of the copies.

“Google Book Search Settlement: Foster Competition, Escrow the Scans”

In "Google Book Search Settlement: Foster Competition, Escrow the Scans," Peter Eckersley proposes that digitized books involved in the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement be put in escrow for some period, then made freely available.

Here's an excerpt:

One good compromise might be to require that anyone who takes a blanket license (whether under the Google Book Search settlement, or under any legislation that might expand the settlement to others) must deposit a copy of the raw scans that they create with the Library of Congress or with the entity that administers the blanket license (e.g., the Books Rights Registry). After a period of years, let's say 14, the term of the Founder's Copyright, those scans should be made available at no cost to any others who take the relevant copyright licenses.

This would not only encourage market entry and competition in the online digital books arena, but would also foster innovation in the field. There's nothing that encourages digital innovation quite like access to an enormous dataset. After all, before Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google, they were graduate students at Stanford. They were able to build a new search engine by downloading their own copy of the web, messing around with it, and figuring our a better algorithm for querying it. New start-ups working with digital books should have the same kind of opportunity.

Justice Department Sends Civil Investigative Demands to Google about Google Book Search Settlement

The Justice Department has sent civil investigative demands to Google about the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement. Various state attorneys generals are also looking into the settlement.

Read more about it at "Google Book Deal Faces Growing Scrutiny," "Probe of Google Book Deal Heats Up," and "U.S. Presses Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Book Settlement."

Welsh Journals Online: Final Report

JISC has released Welsh Journals Online: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

Welsh Journals Online is the most challenging digitisation project ever undertaken by the National Library of Wales. It aimed to create a website giving free searchable and browsable access to the contents of back-numbers of the major journals relating to Wales or the Welsh language. These journals form the core of the Library’s collection of printed books and are its most-used resource.

The journals were chosen to represent the diversity of material available, and cover English- and Welsh-language titles including scholarly articles on topics from archaeology to zoology, poetry, fiction, reviews and obituaries. The project publishes 400,000 pages of text, from 52 titles; the 180,000 pages of Welsh content represents the single largest corpus of text in the language available on the web. Some of the titles are well-known and widely used as sources (eg Archaeologia Cambrensis), while others have been overlooked or are difficult to access (Yr Arloeswr). . . .

The website is fully exposed to Google and it is likely that many new users will find the resource through general searching of the web. For those who are unfamiliar with the journal literature of Wales some contextual help is provided in the form of factsheets; lesson plans based upon these have also been created to assists teachers wishing to use the Welsh Journals Online website to discuss the questions of copyright, searching, or referencing.

The majority of the material is covered by copyright, and licensing and rights management formed a significant part of the project. The need to control display at page level (so that where necessary a single article or photograph could be blanked) required detailed metadata to record permission, gathered in cooperation with the publishers. Of the titles included, the proportion of blanked pages is very low (less than 0.1%), but rights issues led to the exclusion of some titles completely. The Library did not offer any payment for permission and works by Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, and R S Thomas are therefore not shown. Given that the cost-per-page of web publication is approximately £2, the payment of even minimal fees would transform the economics of mass-digitisation.

“Deal or No Deal: What If the Google Settlement Fails?”

In "Deal or No Deal: What If the Google Settlement Fails?," Andrew Richard Albanese examines the uncertain future of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement.

Here's an excerpt:

"This thing is going to die," one close observer of the settlement told PW [Publishers Weekly]. "Let's put it this way—with all the sketchy things in the agreement, there is no way [the parties] want people to look at this longer, rather than shorter."

Google and University of Michigan Sign Expanded Digitization Agreement

Google and the University of Michigan have signed an expanded digitization agreement that incorporates the terms of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Specifically, the agreement:

Expands the scope of Google and University of Michigan's partnership:
The University of Michigan continues its tradition of leadership in library digitization by being the first library to expand its partnership with Google under the terms of Google's settlement agreement with a broad class of authors and publishers. The principles underlying the new agreement are to ensure access to our collection, to provide a solid foundation for future research and study, and to provide the greatest public good for patrons of libraries around the US.

Broadens public access to University of Michigan's collections:
Once the settlement is approved by the court, readers and students throughout the US will enjoy the benefits of University of Michigan's collections, including free previews, the ability to buy access to University of Michigan's books online, and institutional subscriptions.

Supports shared services with other libraries:
The agreement empowers University of Michigan to broaden public access to its collection by using digital files of books that Google scans to strengthen and support initiatives like HathiTrust.

Provides greater digital access to University of Michigan's collections for students and faculty:
University of Michigan will get a digital copy of every book held in their collection, whether it's scanned from Michigan or at another library.

Broadens access to public domain books from University of Michigan's collection:
The University of Michigan will be able to share digital copies of public domain works Google has digitized from its collection with fellow academic institutions, libraries, and other organizations for non-commercial purposes. These provisions enable Michigan to share its digital library collection with students, scholars, and other library users around the world.

Subsidizes University of Michigan's Institutional Subscription:
If approved by the court, Google's agreement with authors and publishers allows it to make millions of digitized books available to colleges and universities via a subscription. Under our new agreement, Google will subsidize the cost of Michigan's subscription based on the number of books scanned from Michigan. In practice, this means that Google will subsidize the entire cost of Michigan's institutional subscription–so that Michigan's students and staff will be able to access and read almost every book Google has digitized from 29 libraries around the world, for free.

Expands access for students, faculty, and patrons with disabilities:
Google will make public domain works digitized from Michigan's print library collection accessible to users with print disabilities in the same ways as in-copyright books covered under the settlement agreement.

Safeguards the public's access to knowledge:
Michigan's agreement includes collective terms Google has committed to that can be enjoyed by any of Google's other partner libraries. Michigan is the first university to sign on to these terms, which give libraries new ways to help safeguard the public's access to these books.

Establishes a mechanism to review prices:
Our agreement gives Michigan and other participating libraries the power to review the pricing of Institutional Subscriptions to make sure that they are priced for "broad penetration," as required by the settlement agreement. That means that the reviewer will evaluate whether subscriptions are affordable enough to allow universities, libraries, and other institutions across the country to take advantage of them.

If they determine that prices are too high, University of Michigan and other participating libraries who sign these collective terms can challenge the prices through arbitration, and Google will be required to work with the Registry to adjust the pricing accordingly.

Ensures access to millions of books for generations to come:
Google has committed to make the books it has scanned publicly available for free search, consumer purchase, institutional subscriptions, and other services established by the settlement agreement. Our agreement ensures that libraries and their patrons can continue to use digital copies of the millions of books Google has scanned well into the future, even if Google goes away.

Also see the press release.

Cornell Lifts Use Restrictions on Reproductions of Public Domain Works, Including over 70,000 E-Books

The Cornell University Library has eliminated use restrictions on reproductions of public domain works, including over 70,000 e-books.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In a dramatic change of practice, Cornell University Library has announced it will no longer require its users to seek permission to publish public domain items duplicated from its collections. Instead, users may now use reproductions of public domain works made for them by the Library or available via Web sites, without seeking any further permission.

The Library, as the producer of digital reproductions made from its collections, has in the past licensed the use of those reproductions. Individuals and corporations that failed to secure permission to repurpose these reproductions violated their agreement with the Library. "The threat of legal action, however," noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, "does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks."

The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell’s donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive (details at www.archive.org/details/cornell).

"Imposing legally binding restrictions on these digital files would have been very difficult and in a way contrary to our broad support of open access principles," said Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "It seemed better just to acknowledge their public domain status and make them freely usable for any purpose. And since it doesn't make sense to have different rules for material that is reproduced at the request of patrons, we have removed permission obligations from public domain works."

Institutional restrictions on the use of public domain work, sometimes labeled "copyfraud," have been the subject of much scholarly criticism. The Cornell initiative goes further than many other recent attempts to open access to public domain material by removing restrictions on both commercial and non-commercial use. Users of the public domain works are still expected to determine on their own that works are in the public domain where they live. They also must respect non-copyright rights, such as the rights of privacy, publicity, and trademark. The Library will continue to charge service fees associated with the reproduction of analog material or the provision of versions of files different than what is freely available on the Web. All library Web sites will be updated to reflect this new policy during 2009.

The new Cornell policy can be found at cdl.library.cornell.edu/guidelines.html.

ACRL, ALA, and ARL File Comments about Google Book Search Settlement

The American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Association of Research Libraries have filed comments with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York regarding the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Representing over 139,000 libraries and 350,000 librarians, the associations filed the brief as members of the plaintiff class because they are both authors and publishers of books. The associations asserted that although the settlement has the potential to provide public access to millions of books, many of the features of the settlement, including the absence of competition for the new services, could compromise fundamental library values including equity of access to information, patron privacy, and intellectual freedom. The court can mitigate these possible negative effects by regulating the conduct of Google and the Book Rights Registry the settlement establishes.

"While this settlement agreement could provide unprecedented access to a digital library of millions of books, we are concerned that the cost of an institutional subscription may skyrocket, as academic journal subscriptions have over the past two decades," Erika Linke, President of ACRL, said. . . .

Jim Rettig, President of ALA, said the proposed settlement "offers no assurances that the privacy of what the public accessed will be protected, which is in stark contrast to the long-standing patron privacy rights libraries champion on behalf of the public."

DigitalKoans

Foreign Opposition to the Google Book Search Settlement

Foreign opposition to the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement appears to be growing as the rights holder opt-out deadline nears.

Read more about it at "174 Writers, Poets Reject Google Book Search Offer"; "BA Warns Rights Holders over Google"; "Europeans Seem to Know Little About Google Settlement, But Enough Not to Like It"; and "German Authors Outraged at Google Book Search."

Google Asks Permission to Extend Author Opt-Out Deadline by 60 Days

Google has requested permission from the presiding court to extend the deadline for authors to opt out of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement by 60 days.

Here's an excerpt from "Extending Notice on the Google Book Search Settlement":

It's pretty easy for credit card companies to contact their cardholders—they send bills to them all the time. The world's authors, publishers and their heirs are much more difficult to find. So, as the New York Times recently reported, the plaintiffs hired notice campaign specialists Kinsella Media Group to tell them about this exciting settlement, and Google has devoted millions of dollars to fund this notice campaign. . . .

The settlement is highly detailed, and we want to make sure rightsholders everywhere have enough time to think about it and make sure it's right for them. That's why we've asked the court for permission to extend the opt-out deadline for an extra 60 days.

Read more about it at "Delay Looming For Google Settlement Deadline?" and "Google Seeks More Time in Book Search Case."