Today was to be the deadline for objecting to, opting out of, and/or filing briefs with the court on the Google Book Search Settlement. That was the plan, at least, when the preliminary approval statement from the court was issued last year. That deadline changed, and that is part of a recent flurry of activity surrounding the proposed Settlement. This post provides a summary of recent news and an index of documents that you might want to read for more information.

First, Recent News

• The Internet Archive, a recognized library in the State of California, filed a request to intervene as a defendant party to the lawsuit in order to represent the interests of libraries. (Open Content Alliance blog, 17-Apr-2009) The request was subsequently denied. (Court order by Denny Chin, 24-Apr-2009)
• The judge overseeing the Settlement agreed to a request by a coalition of copyright holders — members of the proposed plaintiff class — to postpone the date by which rights holders needed to opt-out of the settlement class or file objections to the settlement itself to September 4th. (Wired Magazine, 27-Apr-2009; Court order by Denny Chin)
• The Justice Department reportedly initiated an inquiry into antitrust implications of the Settlement agreement. This doesn’t mean that the department will oppose the settlement, but it suggests that the department finds some of the arguments being made at least worthy of further inquiry. (New York Times, 28-Apr-2009)
• Google began to respond to some of the criticism directed on its Public Policy Blog (“Google’s views on government, policy and politics”). In this initial post, one of a promised many, the director of product management for Google Book Search describes how the settlement agreement represents expanded access over what the Book Search service currently offers. (Google Public Policy Blog, 29-Apr-2009)
• ALA, ACRL, and ARL filed a brief [22-page PDF] with the court requesting that it provide for strict supervision over the implementation of the agreement, should the court approve it. (DLTJ summary of brief, 4-May-2009; NY Times Bits Blog, 4-May-2009)

Then, More In-depth Information

• Pamela Samuelson for O’Reilly Radar: Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement — A little over four printed pages giving a very brief overview of the Settlement, describing the class action nature of the lawsuit, the potential for a Google monopoly of the largest digital library of books, and the sticky problem of orphan works. (17-Apr-2009, also scheduled to appear in the July 2009 issue of Communications of the ACM)
• ALA/ARL Settlement Summary: A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries & the Google Library Project Settlement [PDF]: Twenty-three double-spaced pages that is an early description of the terms of the settlement agreement with a focus on what the settlement, as currently written, could mean for libraries. (13-Nov-2008)
• James Grimmelmann for the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy: The Google Book Search Settlement: Ends, Means, and the Future of Books — Seventeen pages of dense prose in three parts: an analysis of the lawsuit and its settlement, an in-depth examination of the problem of orphan works, and a proposal for handling the resolution of orphan works through a legislative process rather than a judicial process. (April 2009)
• Walt Crawford’s Cites & Insights: “Perspective: The Google Book Search Settlement” — Walt devotes an entire 30-page issue to summation of the issues and pointers to dozens (if not 100) other postings and reports on the Settlement. Highly recommended if you want to dive in and learn all you can about the nature of the settlement and the resulting commentary. (March 2009)

We are starting to see objections to the Google Book Search Settlement this month in advance of the May 5th deadline set up by the court. The first comes from the consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog (found by way of the American Libraries news feed). They have submitted a letter to the U.S. Justice Department asking the antitrust division to delay the settlement until the “‘most favored nation’ clause favoring Google is removed and the deal’s ‘orphan works’ provision is extended to cover all who might digitize books, not only Google.” The letter in PDF is available on the Consumer Watchdog website. The objections revolve around the provision that require the Books Rights Registry to give Google the same terms as anyone else who enters into agreements with the Registry (noting that more favorable terms might be required by a new party in order to compete with Google) as well as the fact that the copyright infringement protection for digitizing orphan works only extends to Google.

The American Libraries news piece also says: “ALA, in conjunction with the Association for Research Libraries and ALA’s Association of College and Research Libraries, plans to file an amicus brief with the court about the settlement.” We’ll likely see that before the May deadline.

Another objection came from the Open Content Alliance. On behalf of the OCA, Internet Archive filed an intervention request with the court seeking to become a party to the settlement. The document, located on the Scribd service (an odd choice, if you were to ask me), is asking to add itself as a defendant because the rights of internet content providers and of the public were not represented in the negotiations. In the paragraph in the middle of the letter, it says “All other persons, including Internet content providers such as the [Internet] Archive, would not be able to use orphan works broadly without being exposed to claims to infringement.” And further down: “Google has negotiated for itself certainty in its use of orphan works under the terms of the settlement through the mechanism of the [Books Rights Registry], whereas marketplace competitors are able to negotiate with the [Registry] only for commercial exploitation of those works with identified rightsholders.”

Stay tuned — I think this is going to get more interesting in the next few weeks.

Update

17-Apr-2009

The O’Reilly Radar blog has a post by Pamela Samuelson, professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information and the School of Law, on this very topic. While not a formal filing with the court, she comments on the legal implications of the settlement in very clear language.

This column argues that the proposed settlement of this lawsuit is a privately negotiated compulsory license primarily designed to monetize millions of orphan works. It will benefit Google and certain authors and publishers, but it is questionable whether the authors of most books in the corpus (the ‘dead souls’ to which the title refers) would agree that the settling authors and publishers will truly represent their interests when setting terms for access to the Book Search corpus.

The Espresso Book Machine (EBM) might also of interest here in Ohio. OhioLINK is building a repository of recent current-year books that we license from publishers. One wonders, with the addition of an add-on license fee to the copyright owners, whether we could use such a machine to print on-demand books from current titles. On Demand Books is obviously thinking along the same lines; in April they entered into a partnership with Lightning Source Industries, which enables the EBM to print from Lightning Source’s catalogue of over 500,000 in-copyright books. The EBM can also access nearly 400,000 public domain books through their relationship with the Open Content Alliance.

So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at the technical specifications of the EBM.

About the Espresso Book Machine

The EBM will print bind and trim a 300 page book in about 7 minutes with a one printer model and in about 3 minutes with a two printer model. Production cost is a penny a page. Consumables used by the EBM are paper, cover stock and toner suitable for laser printers, glue and charcoal filters. The first three are commonly available consumables. The glue for binding will cost less than $100 and can be used for roughly 10,000 books. The charcoal filter is replaced about once a month and costs about $1.

The trim size of a book is infinitely variable between 8.5” by 11” and 4.5” x 4.5” and the EBM version 1.5 can bind up to 550 pages. The shearing blade has to be sharpened about every 5,000 – 10,000 books; sharpening by manufacturer is recommended.

The file formats accepted are the exact same files as one would use in traditional book printing: a PDF for the book block and (ideally) a PDF for the cover. The machine will print (and then bind and trim) anything a laser printer can print. The software on the machine itself does not combine individual files into a single book; it must be “pre-made” before being delivered to the Espresso machine.

How the machine actually behaves is a bit unclear to me. The publicity says that all interaction with the machine is performed via a standard browser. The decision of how broadly to expose that interface (local network only, campus-wide, internet-wide, etc.) is reportedly up to the owner of the EBM. It is also unclear as to how the content repository works. The promotional materials speak of a world-wide content repository for Espresso machines and that content can be restricted to a particular location, but then it also goes on to say that a site can manage its own content repository or that the manufacturer of the machine can do that function for an added fee. If I learn more, I’ll update this post. If anyone knows anything about how the content repository works, please comment or get in touch with me privately.

Brewster Kahle, Director of the Internet Archive, was interviewed this week in a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization. Among the many interesting points in the interview was that one of the biggest challenges is to such a mass digitization effort to believe that to digitize massive numbers of books and make them available is actually possible. The Open Content Alliance has put together a suite of technology that brings down the cost for a color scan with OCR to 10 cents per page or about $30 per book. He then goes on to perform this calculation: the library system in the U.S. is a 12B industry. One million books digitized a year is $30M, or “a little less than .3 percent of one year’s budget of the United States library system would build a 1 million book library that would be available to anyone for free.” He also covers copyright concerns including the more liberal copyright laws in countries such as China.

Source: Audio: How Digital Book Collections Will Change Academe
Address : < http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v53/i30/khale/>
Date Visited: Fri Mar 30 2007 16:19:24 GMT-0400 (EDT)

The text was modified to remove a link to http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v53/i30/khale/ on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v53/i30/khale/ on January 19th, 2011.