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Google Book Search Settlement Analysis

Pam Samuelson has a great article on the O'Reilly blog - thanks to Colleen Lindsay for tweeting it - on the Google Book Search settlement. It's very thoughtful and well-articulated, and the comments are also well worth reading. She also links to some slides from a presentation she gave on the subject.

She's especially cogent on the subject of orphan works:

An estimated 70 per cent of the books in the Book Search repository are in-copyright, but out of print. Most of them are, for all practical purposes, “orphan works,” that is, works for which it is virtually impossible to locate the appropriate rights holders to ask for permission to digitize them.

A broad consensus exists about the desirability of making orphan works more widely available. Yet, without a safe harbor against possible infringement lawsuits, digitization projects pose significant copyright risks. Congress is considering legislation to lessen the risks of using orphan works, but it has yet to pass.

The proposed Book Search settlement agreement will solve the orphan works problem for books—at least for Google. Under this agreement, which must be approved by a federal court judge to become final, Google would get, among other things, a license to display up to 20 per cent of the contents of in-copyright out-of-print books, to run ads alongside these displays, and to sell access to the full texts of these books to institutional subscribers and to individual purchasers.

 

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Posted by Laura Dawson , April 20, 09, 9:54 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post
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