Attended an excellent presentation today at the iSchool about the Google Book Settlement. Here are my notes from the event, based on the talk, powerpoint slides and discussion at the end.
Presenters were as follows: Sian Meikle, Digital Services Librarian, University of Toronto Libraries, Tony Horava, Coordinator of Collections and Information Resources, University of Ottawa
Panel discussion and Moderated Q&A: Abraham Drassinower, Chair, Legal, Ethical and Cultural Implications of Technological Innovation, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto; Mark Haslett, University Librarian, University of Waterloo; Victoria Owen, Head Librarian, University of Toronto Scarborough.
Moderator: Dan Dagostino, Collections Librarian, University of Toronto Libraries
- The Google project began in 2004
- 10 million books have been digitized to date; 2M in the public domain, 7.5M in copyright, out of print and 0.5M in copyright, in print
- The American Publishers Association and the American Authors Guild launched a class action lawsuit in 2005.
- A settlement was developed in response to this suit.
- The U.S. Department of Justice advised that the courts not accept the settlement on 18/9/09
- The final hearing was delayed last week. There will now be a status conference instead.
Settlement Outline:
- Only covers books (doesn’t cover illustrations in books, etc.)
- Google offering to pay $125M to establish a Book Registry, to pay rights holders for books scanned prior to May, 2009 (offering $60/title)
- Split of future revenues – 63% copyright holders; 37% to Google
- For items that are out of print, Google wanted an opt-out approach; this was deemed unacceptable; should be opt-IN
- Book Registry meant to manage rights database, negotiate prices and terms – has no mandate to be publicly available.
- Also offering a Research Corpus (all Google books, except in-copyright works whose rights holders have removed their works). Hosted at Google, plus two other sites. To use it and do research, must submit a research agenda for approval, which raises questions about privacy and academic freedom.
The Positives: its a huge corpus of knowledge that would be available and the orphans (out of print) log jam is effectively dealt with
The Negatives: it’s a de facto monopoly, has large implications for user privacy, intellectual freedom, transparency, equity of access and long term security of data
Copyright
- General view that settlement will be influential in setting de facto standards for fair use – # of pages that can be printed, displayed, etc.
- Contractual licensing is supplanting copyright legislation as the driver for reproducing and disseminating in-copyright books – implications for cultural heritage, we risk loss of stewardship role of libraries
- Board of registry has no librarian or reader representation, therefore can we expect a balanced approach to copyright, access, pricing, etc.?
- Settlement is silent on how agreements between libraries and Registry would ensure users can exercise rights under U.S. Copyright Act
Has a dampener effect on open access and Creative Commons – how will long term plans of Open Content Alliance be affected, for example.
Privacy & Marketing
- “most favoured nation” status for Google
- Gets virtual monopoly for 10 years
- Upward pressure on pricing – affordability in a limited market
- Only Google can license ‘orphaned’ works (in the absence of legislation)
- Two goals: 1. market realization of revenue for rights holders and 2. broad access by public – which is priority? Can they be balanced? Broad access is to be based on comparable products and services, but there aren’t any comparable products/services to this
- Huge influence on pricing for out of print books
Integration & Curation Issues
- Google has opened book search via APIs (can embed book images, previews, etc. in discovery layers and catalogues)
- Can’t download in copyright books to e-book readers or other devices
- Preservation based on commercial model, not certifiable standards in a non-profit research environment. Permanence? What if Google business model changes?
- As stands now, settlement offers limited form of collaboration
- Cannot enhance texts, no layering of services, no mash ups permitted; compare this to dynamic developments in e-book reader interfaces
Competition
- How will pricing for Institutional Database Subscription (IDS) put pressure on libraries to acquire
- How are e-book aggregators affected? (NetLibrary, ebrary)
- Turf wars: Amazon refuses to collaborate
- Google willing to make public domain titlesin ePub format
- Book Search won’t be able to offer range of functionality and tools as ScholarsPortal as discovery environment for researchers
Privacy
- Google has opportunity to track user reading habits via encrypted session info (what pages viewed, how long on a page, etc.)
Intellectual Freedom
- Google has right to exclude materials for “editorial” reasons. What is to prevent Google from suppressing materials that might create controversy/embarrassment?
Equity of Access
- Works within works are likely excluded from display (charts, illustrations, etc.) as they usually belong to different rights holders, therefore work is incomplete
- Momentum driving supply and demand – may see increase in digital divide.
Future Business Opportunities
- Google will provide public domain books to On Demand books using Espresso Book Machines
- To compete, publishers will need to focus more on metadata, DRM, XML to package content into different units
Resources
Read the Department of Justice’s brief
Check out Pamela Samuelson’s column at the Huffington Post