Pam Samuelson: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement - O'Reilly Radar (The Googlization of Everything)

Conclusion
In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement--more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.

The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry's future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is.

Filed under: Is Google a Library?
Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan, April 24, 2009 3:19 PM

Comments (1)

Jardinero1 on April 25, 2009 11:21 AM:

There seems to be an a priori assumption that "meaningful government oversight" is always for the good or the best. I don't think that is always the case and she certainly makes no attempt to prove that assumption. If two or more parties agree to a deal, must it always require a legislative act, and executive action as well?

Her critique of the settlement, really, is a critique of class action suits. Yes, it's a huge problem to allow a small minority of persons to form a class and then allow them to claim to represent all persons. Were any of the orphan works authors ever mailed an opt out letter? Talk about tyranny.

The upshot, I suppose, is that, since the author's guild sued their way into this deal; they and Google will find themselves being sued in the future by other persons or classes of persons who want a peice of the action as well.

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