In a post on Sunday, we mentioned the writing of Law Professor Pamela Samuelson from the UC Berkeley Law School (she is also has a Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information). At that point, she had written three columns about Google Book Search.

Today, she has written a new piece for The Huffington Post. The column is titled, Google Books Is Not a Library and in many was is a response to Sergey Brin’s Op-Ed column in the New York Times last week.

Here are just a few selected passages. Make sure to read the complete column.

Unlike the Alexandria library or modern public libraries, the Google Book Search (GBS) initiative is a commercial venture that aims to monetize millions of out-of-print books, many of which are “orphans,” that is, books whose rights holders cannot readily be found after a diligent search. David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, has estimated that about twenty per cent of the books in the GBS corpus are orphans, but other estimates are higher. Even twenty per cent, however, equals millions of books.
[Snip]
If Google Books was just a library, as Brin claims, library associations would not have submitted briefs expressing reservations about the GBS settlement to the federal judge who will be deciding whether to approve the deal. Libraries everywhere are terrified that Google will engage in price-gouging when setting prices for institutional subscriptions to GBS contents…Prices for these subscriptions are to be set based on the number of books in the corpus, the services available, and prices of comparable products and services (of which there are none). Given that major research libraries today often pay in excess of $4 million a year for access to several thousand journals, they have good reason to be concerned that Google will eventually seek annual fees in excess of this for subscriptions to millions of GBS books.
[Snip]
Brin forgot to mention another significant difference between GBS and traditional libraries: their policies on patron privacy. The proposed settlement agreement contains numerous provisions that anticipate monitoring of uses of GBS content; so far, though, Google has been unwilling to make meaningful commitments to protect user privacy. Traditional libraries, by contrast, have been important guardians of patron privacy. When you enter a library, you can search for books without anyone tracking your queries, you can read whatever is available for as long as you want without anyone monitoring your intellectual privacy, and you can check books out knowing that the records of what you’ve checked out will be protected from disclosure by state laws and by librarian ethics obligations.
[Snip]
That Google will serve ads alongside search results that yield GBS results is not surprising for the open Internet searches that users will do. But Google is now pressing university partners to accept ads even for the institutional subscriptions.

Read the Complete Column

Source: The Huffington Post

See Also: This post contains links to Professor Samuelson’s other columns in The Huffington Post

From the Article:

Information society and media commissioner Viviane Reding made the rallying call on Tuesday as the Commission announced its Communication on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy, a strategy document that lays out measures to be taken to digitise and disseminate books in Europe.

“Europe should seize this opportunity to take the lead, and to ensure that books digitisation takes place on the basis of European copyright law, and in full respect of Europe’s cultural diversity,” Reding said in a statement on Tuesday.

She added: “Europe, with its rich cultural heritage, has most to offer and most to win from books digitisation. If we act swiftly, pro-competitive European solutions on books digitisation may well be sooner operational than the solutions presently envisaged under the Google Books Settlement in the United States.”

[Snip]

According to a European Commission spokesperson, the full Communication on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy will be released in full in the next few days.

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: ZDNet UK

See Also: European Commission to investigate copyright (via The Bookseller)

From the Article:

In her weekly video podcast, before Tuesday’s opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair, {German Federal Chancellor Angela} Merkel appealed for more international cooperation on copyright protection and said her government opposed Google’s drive to scan libraries full of books.

“The German government has a clear position: copyrights have to be protected in the Internet,” Merkel said, adding there are “considerable dangers” for copyright protection in the Internet.

“That’s why we reject the scanning in of books without any copyright protection — like Google is doing. The government places a lot of weight on this position on copyrights to protect writers in Germany.”
[Snip]
Merkel, who will open the world’s largest book fair in Germany’s financial capital, said there was a need to discuss the issue in greater detail in international institutions.

She did not, however, offer any concrete solutions.

Source: Reuters

+++ UPDATE: A text transcript of Merkel’s remarks is available (PDF) in German. We translated the document into English using Zoho Viewer and both Google Translate and Yahoo Babel Fish. Again, these are mechanical translations. Caveat Emptor!

+++ UPDATE: Here’s the actual video podcast (in German).

See Also: Book Trade Seeks a Deal with Google

The rest of the world — especially France and Germany — continues largely to view Google with suspicion. The company is sending its top lawyer to Frankfurt to engage once again with the industry.

“Books that were previously out of print will come back to life,” Santiago de la Mora, Google’s head of European print partnerships, told Reuters. “There are 1.8 billion Internet users. I’m pretty sure you can find readers for everything.”

The article also discusses ebooks and content piracy.

Source: Reuters

From the Wall Street Journal

At a meeting with reporters* in New York Monday, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt acknowledged that the parties may have to exclude orphan works from the settlement to get it approved.

The parties are also contemplating other modifications, including changes to the structure of the registry, the groups of authors and publishers that are charged with overseeing the settlement, setting some prices, and sharing revenue with copyright owners, say people familiar with the matter.

*in this article. (via WSJ). You can find two more reviews of the meeting from AllThingsD. and Search Engine Land.
** Brewster Kahle from the Open Content Alliance responds to some of the comments made by Sergey Brin.

From the NY Times:

The federal judge who is responsible for reviewing the Google book settlement that would create a vast digital library has set Nov. 9 as the date by which Google and its partners must submit a revised settlement for the court’s preliminary approval.
[Snip]
At a short hearing Wednesday morning in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Judge Denny Chin confirmed that the current settlement was no longer on the table.
[Snip]
Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said in an interview that the changes would be minor. “We would not be able to do it by Nov. 9” if they were more substantial, he said. “The core agreement is going to stay the same. We are amending limited portions of the settlement agreement.”

From the IDG News Service

“We appreciate the Court’s guidance and look forward to moving ahead. As we’ve said in the past and in the hearing today, we are considering a limited number of amendments to the agreement,” a Google spokeswoman said via e-mail on Wednesday.

“If approved by the Court, the settlement stands to unlock access to millions of books in the U.S. while giving authors and publishers new ways to distribute their work,” she added.

From the AFP:

An attorney speaking for the US Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers said the revised deal was on track.

“The parties have worked on a daily basis, assiduously,” Michael Boni said, and were “working around the clock.”

“We have gone a lone [sic] way to identify and negotiate amendments to the settlement,” he said.

Boni said the November 9 target for a preliminary hearing on the settlement was realistic and that “in the best case scenario we would target late December, early January for the final fairness hearing.”

Daralyn Durie, representing Google, also said the deal was within reach. “The parties’ expectation is that we will be able to present an amended settlement agreement,” she said

From the Open Book Alliance:

“Based on the court hearing today, one thing is clear — whatever revised settlement Google and its partners unveil on November 9th must be subject to full review and scrutiny by the vast array of stakeholders – authors, academics, consumer advocates, privacy groups, libraries, and others – who have spoken out.
[Snip]
“It’s also clear that the settlement partners have zero interest in creating an open process that takes input from critical stakeholders. Instead, Google and its partners are serving their private business interests and ignoring the public interest. They came to the courtroom without a single concrete recommendation of how they would address any of the problems with the original settlement. Instead, they proposed more of the same — secret, back room negotiations – rather than an open, transparent and collaborative process.”

From Bloomberg:

Chin today endorsed a proposal that would limit the time for opponents of the new pact to file court papers opposing it. He said opponents of the accord should voice comments only about new terms, not provisions that remain the same.
[Snip]
“Otherwise, it will be many, many, many months” before the case is resolved, he said.

Chin, who was nominated yesterday by President Barack Obama for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals, said he wanted to create a system by which parties objecting to the settlement may electronically file court papers, rather than hand-delivering them as previously done.

“In this case, of all cases, there should be an electronic way of handling this,” he said to laughter in the packed lower Manhattan courtroom.

From The Laboratorium (Professor James Grimmelmann)

Judge Chin asked about ways to make the submission process easier. The court has a single scanner, and spent four straight days scanning the hard-copy submissions. The Clerk’s office, however, is concerned about asking non-lawyers to use the electronic filing system. Judge Chin asked about the possibility of an email address for electronic submission of comments and objections, possibly through the settlement administration site. Boni said that the settlement agreement requires that objections be served on the parties, so they would be happy to take on the scanning burden.

From the Associated Press:

William F. Cavanaugh, a deputy assistant attorney general, told the judge that the government has been in continuing discussions with the parties.

However, he said the government was not yet aware of what the final deal will look like.

He said he expected “meetings in the near term to go over whatever their proposal is.”

Cavanaugh asked that the judge give the government a week to 10 days after any deadline for objections to be submitted for the Justice Department to prepare its analysis of the new deal.

At one point, [Judge] Chin asked what will happen if negotiations break down and no deal is reached.

Google lawyer Daralyn Durie reassured the judge, saying: “The parties’ expectation is we will be able to reach agreement.”

From Reuters:

“I like the target date of early November. Targeting the changes is the right way to do it,” Chin said during a 15-minute long conference in court with lawyers for the parties and the U.S. Department of Justice.
[Snip]
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said the Justice Department criticisms seem reasonable and the search engine giant is amenable to a few minor changes.

From AllThingsD

Though it’s not yet clear what form the revised settlement might take or what adjusted terms are being discussed, Google and the authors and publishers it has allied with it have quite a few critics to appease, including academics, librarians, privacy advocates, would-be rivals and the French and German governments.

From CNET:

A hearing on whether to approve that settlement was originally scheduled for Wednesday, but last month the publisher and author groups asked for more time to work out a new deal that satisfies the Justice Department’s concerns.