The Day After the Google Hearing: Rounding Up Coverage and Statements
Testimony from UM's Courant, PW's coverage, more
-- Library Journal, 02/19/2010
LJ was at the federal courthouse in Manhattan yesterday for coverage of the Google Book Search Settlement hearing, producing a morning report on on how objectors outnumbered supporters and an afternoon report featuring the Department of Justice, defendant Google, and the plaintiffs, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild.
Here are some additional links. Publishers Weekly offered a more tightly focused report, noting that many of the speakers repeated issues raised in the briefs and that the main event came after lunch, when Google and the plaintiffs vigorously fought an uphill battle.
Eric Hellman offers some helpful analysis on his Go to Hellman blog, pointing out the contrast between the 5 million out-of-print books at issue and the 174 million records (not actually books) cited by some objectors and citing the debate about the term "identical factual predicate," a basis for class action litigation.
Here's coverage in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Reuters. And here's a mega-roundup from ResourceShelf.
Also, keep watch on The Laboratorium, the blog of settlement observer and New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann, for upcoming commentary.
Courant's testimony
The only librarian to testify was University of Michigan Librarian Paul Courant (who's trained as an economist and public policy scholar). His testimony, excerpted:
I also want to note that I've discussed my remarks today with the librarians in the rest of the Big Ten, the University of Chicago and Stanford University, and those librarians are in substantial agreement with what I have to say and asked me to convey that to you.Samuelson's presentation
...The settlement agreement, in contrast, would make the record of scholarship assembled by the nation's great research libraries broadly available to the public and to scholarly communities themselves. The millions of printed works collected by the University of Michigan Library are currently only available to be read in Ann Arbor. Anyone can search the digitized text, but we cannot legally allow the works to be read. That is, you can find bibliographic records, including page numbers, for all the instances of a string of text that occur in the digital collection, but to read the works, you must come to a library that owns them or acquire access to a physical copy in some other way. This is an important point because it is often confused in public debate about this settlement.The alternative to the settlement is not a utopia of universal digital access. Rather, it is the status quo under which most of the works of the 20th Century simply cannot be legally read in digital form and physical and institutional proximity to great collections is the only effective means of access. I note that this status quo actually provides a competitive advantage to institutions such as Michigan that have the richest library collections, but it is in the nature of our commitment to scholarship and its benefits to the public that we are happy to forgo that advantage.
Also see a February 12 presentation, "How Fair is the Google Book Search Settlement," by University of California, Berkeley, law professor Pamela Samuelson. Note Slide #8, titled "Price Gouging Risk," an issue that only Samuelson stressed in court yesteon).
Here's a press release from Consumer Watchdog, which opposes the settlement.
