Why the Google Book Settlement Failed – and What Comes Next? Piling on. Since posting my comments on the Google Book Settlement earlier this week, I have followed other commentary as closely as time has allowed. I have been interested to see that no one else whose comments I have seen seems to think that an appeal is likely. Indeed, I draw that conclusion entirely from the absolute silence I find about that option, while there is much discussion of other possibilities. I imagine the reason for this is the strong sense that the rejection was, as Prof. Pamela Samuelson puts it in this interview, the only conceivable ruling that the judge could have made and that it is quite water-tight from a legal perspective. While it is not unheard of for parties to spend lots of money on lost causes, the majority of commentators obviously feel that Google, the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers will not throw good money after bad by filing an appeal.
HathiTrust Has Posted Their March, 2011 Activities Update « INFOdocket. Opt in for open access « Everybody's Libraries. Is It Time for the Digital Public Library of America? April 11th to 14th, 2014 - Annual Guild of One-Name Studies Conference, Ashford, Kent, United Kingdom April 19, 2014 - Tacoma-Pierce County Genealogical Society, Tacoma, Washington April 27, 2014 - Genealogical Society of Washtenaw County, Michigan May 7 to 10, 2014 - National Genealogical Society annual conference, Richmond, Virginia June 6 to 8, 2014 - Southern California Genealogy Jamboree, Burbank, California June 14, 2014 - Middlesex Society of Genealogists, Middlesex County, Massachusetts 10-11 October 2014 - Western Michigan Genealogical Society's Annual Seminar, Grand Rapids, Michigan December 7 to 14, 2014 -Eastern Caribbean Genealogy Cruise - Fort Lauderdale, Florida; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Basseterre, St. 11 April 2015 - Imperial Polk Genealogical Society Seminar 2015, Lakeland, Florida Dick Eastman LIVE at your event Dick Eastman is available for presentations and full-day seminars at genealogy conferences around the world.
Contact Dick Eastman for more information. GBS at the Crossroads: What Now, What Next? One year ago last February just days before the Google Books Settlement Fairness Hearing, I wrote a blogpost fancifully titled Hurtling Toward the Finish Line: Should the Google Book Settlement Be Approved? In the ensuing weeks and months as we all sat back to await the Court’s ruling and that act of hurtling turned into a very long haul, I’ve had to trade in my Winter Olympics-inspired metaphor for one more reminiscent of an episode of Ice Road Truckers: an interminable and wearying slog on treacherous roads through inhospitable territory and constantly-shifting weather.
Four days ago on March 22nd, that arduous journey reached a new fork in the road with Judge Denny Chin’s decision to reject the proposed Amended Settlement Agreement. As I read the Court’s opinion, Judge Chin’s decision appears to turn on four main elements: What path things will take next, no one yet knows. What do I think about all of this? There are two potential silver linings in a possible opt-in future. Blog: Norway as a Model for a GBS Replacement? The Director of Kopinor, Yngve Slettholm, and the National Librarian of Norway, Vigdis Moe Skarstein, sign the Bookshelf agreement. Foto: Anne Tove Ørke Commentary is flowing fast and furious on what the rejection of the Amended Settlement Agreement brokerd by the plaintiffs with Google means. It is hard to imagine, however, a better analysis than that prepared by Jonathan Band for ARL (though if you want something written with more heat, try "To the whingers go the spoils in the Google book decision").
I've been curious as to what the settlement's critics would like to seen in its place. Norway is frequently trotted out as an alternative approach. In his discussion of the decision in the New York Review of Books, for example, Robert Darnton states that: The most impressive attempts to create national digital libraries are taking shape in Norway and The Netherlands. Ruling Spurs Effort to Form Digital Public Library. Collective licensing as an answer to Google Books’ copyright case. Guideiv-final-1.pdf (Objet application/pdf) Stanford not fazed by Google Books decision. U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin’s Mar. 22 decision may have thwarted Google’s plans to create an online library and bookstore and rejected a $125 million settlement. But it wasn’t enough to deter some of the Internet giant’s partners, including Stanford.
“We’re continuing to scan,” said Andrew Herkovic, director of communications and development at Stanford Libraries. “We’re continuing to receive scanned versions of things back from Google, and we’re doing so for the purpose of both preservation and the future of scholarship using those digitized texts.” The Google library and e-bookstore, which provide online versions of books that are in the public domain, aimed to give readers access to books that are out of print.
“What the publishers are concerned about is losing control over their revenue streams,” Herkovic said. Chin rejected the settlement in order to prevent Google from having a monopoly on the e-book industry. The subsequent steps for Google remain to be seen. San Francisco's Alternative Online Daily News » Google Books Court Rejection Shows Copyright Litigation Is Exhausted.
Time for Congress to Help Pave the Information Highway In contrast with many fellow writers, I believe Google does much more good than bad. I also think the Mountain View Leviathan’s audacious book-scanning project holds great promise as a public utility and comprehensive literary marketplace. But last week’s decision by a federal judge to torpedo Version 2.0 of the Google Books settlement, negotiated by one publishers’ and one authors’ trade groups, has taken the work of private class action attorneys close to their richly deserved dead end. The final cul-de-sac may be the long-anticipated ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the related freelance journalists’ case against electronic database companies; which was known at the Supreme Court as Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick when the justices kicked it back down to the lower courts last year. The higher-profile Google objections were spearheaded by, among others, legal scholar and activist Pamela Samuelson.
Just for once, Google has been given a bloody nose | Technology | The Observer. Last week, a US judge in Manhattan made a landmark decision. As to what it means, opinions vary. Some see it as arresting the cultural progress that began with the Enlightenment; others are celebrating Judge Denny Chin's ruling as the blocking of a predatory move by a giant corporation to control access to the world's cultural heritage. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between. First, the backstory. In 2004, Google decided that it would digitise all the books currently held in a series of major libraries with the aim of making their contents globally available to anyone with a web browser. In the past few decades, everything that has been published in print also exists in digital form, but most of the world's books existed only in paper form and digitising them was a task that most people regarded as insuperable.
For some reason, (possibly because it feared rejection) Google omitted to consult publishers and copyright holders about this bold endeavour. Now we do. Six Reasons Google Books Failed by Robert Darnton | NYRBlog. Judge Denny Chin’s opinion in rejecting the settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who sued it for infringement of their copyrights can be read as both as a map of wrong turns taken in the past and as an invitation to design a better route into the digital future.
Extrapolating from the dense, 48-page text that accompanied the judge’s March 23 decision, it is possible to locate six crucial points where things went awry: First, Google abandoned its original plan to digitize books in order to provide online searching. According to that plan, you would have been able to use Google to search the contents of books for a particular word or brief passage, but would not have been able to view or download a lengthy excerpt or an entire book.
Thus, Google could have justified its display of snippets of text in the search results by invoking the doctrine of fair use. Fourth, rights held by authors and publishers located outside the United States raised similar problems. The Book Deal May Be Dead, But Google Is Still Right: Tech News and Analysis « The Google book settlement — which the search giant signed with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers in 2008, after a dispute over the company’s scanning of books — was struck down by a judge this week as too far-reaching, which is arguably true (although Google would undoubtedly disagree).
But the fact that the arrangement has been rejected might not be such a bad thing, because it puts the spotlight back where it should be: on the fact that Google is doing nothing wrong — legally or morally — in scanning books without the permission of the authors or the publishers of those books. Just to recap, Google started scanning books sometime in 2002, as part of its expressed desire to “index all of the world’s information.” So far, so good. But Google also started scanning and indexing books that were under copyright, then offered authors and publishers the ability to “opt out” of the program and have their books removed.
Why is this important? The Google Settlement Rejection: What Comes Next? When it was introduced in 2008, the Google Book Settlement was hailed by its creators as historic. Now, it is history. On March 22, after more than two years of contentious debate, Judge Denny Chin rejected the controversial proposal on copyright and antitrust grounds. A status conference is set for April 25 in New York, and the parties are free (and some say likely) to appeal the decision, though at press time no appeal had been announced. Seen as the solution to a straightforward copyright claim lodged by authors and publishers against Google in 2005, the settlement offered a complex blueprint for a new digital book business, a $125 million legal puzzle that involved a dizzying array of moving parts: thousands of authors, millions of titles, libraries, the public interest, murky copyright law, orphan works, and even the creation of a new central rights authority, the Book Rights Registry, all of which appear to be off the table now.
For Google For Publishers For the Authors Guild. Dpla-discussion - [dpla-discussion] Concept note. Syndicat national de l'édition. Rejet du projet d'accord de règlement entre Google et les auteurs et éditeurs américains par la justice américaine. - Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. Audrey Azoulay,ministre de la culture et de la Communication, félicite chaleureusement Pierre Huyghe, qui s'est vu décerner le prestigieux Prix du Nasher Sculpture Center à Dallas.À travers ses pr...
Audrey Azoulay, ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, a présenté un budget de la Culture qui atteint 1,1 % du budget de l’Etat, marqué par un niveau de ressources jamais atteint, en hauss... Sur proposition d’Audrey Azoulay, ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, François Hollande, Président de la République, a reconduit Catherine Pégard à la présidence de l’établissement publ... Communication, a souhaité ouvrir les portes du ministère à la jeune création à travers une exposition inédite qu’elle a inaugurée ce matin. L’exposition présente les lauréats « mode et photo » de...
Tous les communiqués de presse. Google Books : le risque de monopole écarté (Mitterrand) ActuaLitté. Google Book Search Settlement Rejected. Google’s Next Stop May Be in Congress. Google books: Creating a digital public library without Google's money - latimes.com. Say what you want about Google — whether you believe it invariably adheres to its motto "Don't be evil" or you suspect that its true goal is world domination — the firm's behavior certainly has a way of shining the spotlight on the most important technological issues in our lives. These include secrecy, privacy and now, in connection with a huge legal fight in which a New York federal judge last week dealt Google a huge defeat, copyright law.
Judge Denny Chin threw a wrench into six years of litigation by tossing out a 165-page settlement reached in 2008 between Google and authors and publishers groups. At issue was Google's plan to create a global digitized library to "unlock the wisdom" imprisoned in the world's out-of-print books, as its co-founder Sergey Brin described the project in 2009. Like other authors and researchers, I'm conflicted about the project. On the other hand, Google was plotting to acquire effective control over millions of works whose copyrights belong to others. With Google Settlement Rejected, Library Groups Keep Eye on Access.
The Voices of Librarians and the DPLA. Initial Statement on Decision on Amended Settlement Agreement of the Google Library Project suit | SULAIR. Stanford Initial Statement on Decision on Amended Settlement Agreement of the Google Library Project suit. 22 March 2011 We are disappointed by the Court’s decision today rejecting the Amended Settlement Agreement in the Google Library Project. The attraction of the project for Stanford lay in our need to preserve for long term use the contents of books (many of which are deteriorating on the shelf) and the desire to index and otherwise analyze the contents of books in order to expose more information, generate more knowledge and foster more expressions. Such knowledge and information in turn not only drive teaching, learning and research, but also drive our economy, our political and social development, and our lives in myriad ways. We appreciate that the Court struggled with the balance between the technological tools that can permit us to harness information and the laws that can block our ability to do so.
Only 5% of books created are currently in print and actively marketed. A Copyright Expert Who Spoke Up for Academic Authors Offers Insights on the Ruling - Technology. By Marc Parry Pamela Samuelson played a lead role in voicing academic authors' concerns over the Google Books settlement. That advocacy made an impact: Judge Denny Chin cited her writing in his ruling rejecting Google's deal with authors and publishers, who were represented by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. In an interview with The Chronicle on Wednesday, Ms. Samuelson, a copyright expert and professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, shared her take on what the judge's decision means—and where we go from here. Q. A. 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.
Q. A. The settlement would grant Google about five different licenses that ordinarily, to get that broad a license, you'd have to get it from Congress. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. Thank You, Judge Chin - The Chronicle Review. By Siva Vaidhyanathan When federal Judge Denny Chin rejected the complex settlement among Google, large commercial publishers, and the elite Authors Guild this week, he may have set back Google's plans to digitize millions of books and offer them for sale online, thereby establishing monopoly control over the sale of electronic versions of the vast majority of those published in the 20th century. But Chin also generated some outstanding opportunities for the scholars and libraries to build something far better than a used bookstore. Google might decide to scale back its ambitions for its Google Book Search program. Or it might decide to fight on for two, three, or five more years to be able to build the sort of dominant, comprehensive service it has always wanted.
Regardless, we now have time to strengthen and champion the values of academe and librarianship instead of crass commercialism. The first thing that we must do is realize what is within our grasp. Judge Chin rejects AAP/Google settlement. Response to the Amended Settlement Agreement Decision | www.hathitrust.org. Policy Notes, Library Copyright Alliance Statement on the Google Books Decision. The Laboratorium: Inside Judge Chin's Opinion.
What's next for "Google's" Book Rights Registry? Google Books: Copyright Settlement Rejected. Federal judge rejects Google book monopoly. Google.books.settlement. Www.arl.org/bm~doc/gbs-march-madness-diagram-final.pdf. Gallery: Peter Murray. L’accord Google Books n’est pas raisonnable - La Feuille - Blog LeMonde.fr. La justice américaine rejette l'accord entre Google et les éditeurs. Auteurs, éditeurs et Google Books autour de la table ActuaLitté. The Authors Guild - Scott Turow on Google Ruling. National Writers Union response to Google Book Settlement decision. Google Settlement is Rejected. Singel-Minded: To the Whingers Go the Spoils in the Google Books Decision | Epicenter