Today Georgetown hosted the Eighth Scholarly Communications Symposium to discuss the implications of the Google Book Search Settlement. Siva Vaidhyanathan and James Grimmelmann both had great points to make. The session was recorded and will hopefully be posted soon, but in the meantime here are my notes:

James Grimmelmann

• Google Book Search (GBS) started out as an indexing project
• The scale makes individual negotiation prohibitively expensive
• Hanging over all this is the orphan works prohect
• Google is becoming potentially the world’s largest book seller
• This is an elegant solution to breaking the orphan works logjam because it is opt-out
• “Google may become the only game in town for serious online access to many of these works.”
• Book Rights Registry
• Settlement makes almost no provision for the privacy of readers
• Privacy is at the hear of an intellectual history that libraries are at the center of
• No consumer-rights work
• First sale, etc. are shot
• All copyright owners are bound by this because of its class-action nature
• If this lawsuit was to try the copyright status of GBS, it didn’t need to be class-action
• Class-action was necessary to solve orphan works, but paradoxically throws all those unknown owners behind the worrisome provisions
• “This is not the way these types of things should be done in a democracy. We have public institutions to solve gigantic issues, not the courtroom. The courtroom’s adversarial approach is the wrong way to determine the future of information.”
• But the settlement is still a net positive

Siva Vaidytanathan

• Most books will never pop out in GBS. Even rediscovered works will only make a couple cents a year.
• GBS will have minimal impact on out-of-print works – otherwise they would be in print
• Lessig, Doctorow, etc greeted GBS with much excitement. It was a big company fighting for fair use.
  • Copying was incidental and necessary – what mattered was the user experience
  • Siva disagreed with Doctorow over whether or not Google indexing would be a boon to authors
• Sony Betamax had created the general right to copy for personal uses and gave breathing room for technology companies
• Fair use isn’t supposed to be decided en masse. It need to be determined on a case-by-case basis
• Libraries should have done this, especially because they have special rights under copyright
• “Nothing about Google is just about what’s on the screen.” GBS was about gathering the lexicon of humanity – they want semantic analysis of text to improve search function. This was not simply about creating an index.
• Google was imposing the copyright norms of the web onto the rest of the world – the default is expecting copying by search engines
• If Google had lost, they would have been betting their whole business
• Deal with libraries was quid pro quo – libraries got a digital copy of everything they gave Google. That is payment for the use of the material. That was the APA’s silver bullet.
• Google needs to still care about this project in ten years.
• “Why are we betting everything on what may be a fly-by company in the scale of history.” We are sacrificing better options for expediency.
• The nondisclosure agreements are anathema to scholars and academics, but that’s how Google works
• Libraries are one of the few noncommercial places in America. Google’s vending machine is troubling because it changes that.
• Deeply troubled by lack of user confidentiality
• We need to know how book search algorithm works
  • It doesn’t reflect what experts consider the top books in a given field
• The gatekeeping function is about standard and term setting. That’s where winners and losers are picked. This is far subtler than it used to be.
• Not convinced we’ve missed the opportunity
  • Outlining the Human Knowledge Project (like Human Genome Project where scientists rejected Venter’s Solera – a private project. The two databases complement each other)
  • Pool resources globally – to preserve and extend the record of human knowledge

Q&A

• Budget setters may stop physical collections
  • Scans are not archive quality and have errors that may be undiscovered
• Because the libraries are not parties to the lawsuit, they have no real standing
• Google’s presence takes the air out of any other digitization plans
• Access medium, not a preservation medium.
• Rare materials should be digitized more because that’s what people cannot get access to
• Open Content Alliance is a “heartbreaking” story