Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement

This short article argues that the proposed settlement of the Authors Guild v. Google 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.

Several options available for retrieval of full text.

Source: Communications of the ACM, forthcoming (Pamela Samuelson), via SSRN

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 and is filed under Digitization Projects, Intellectual Property, Papers and Presentations, Source File, Web Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.