From the Library Journal Article:

While much mainstream news coverage of the pending Google Book Search settlement has focused on the potential boon to researchers, concerns raised by librarians and consumers have begun to hit critical mass. One sign was a front-page article in the April 4 New York Times, headlined Google’s Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged, which noted that two sets of academics plan to intervene in the settlement..

Notably, the settlement gives Google essentially exclusive rights in making available the bulk of the books it has digitized from libraries: “orphan works,” those both in copyright but out of print, with the rights holders unavailable. The article quoted Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton’s warning about Google as monopoly; he previously expressed fears that Google would use that monopoly power to raise prices while reselling the database to libraries.

Source: LJ

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