[InetBib] Google Book Settlement - die Schlacht geht weiter

[delin@xxxxxx (Delin, Peter)]

Gestern in der New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/technology/internet/04books.html
Peter Delin

The settlement, “takes the vast bulk of books that are in research 
libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of 
Google,” said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library 
system. “Google will be a monopoly.”

...

Opposition to the 134-page agreement, which the parties announced in 
October, has been building slowly as its implications have become 
clearer. Groups that plan to raise concerns with the court include the 
American Library Association (!) [mehr dazu hier: http://wo.ala.org/gbs/ 
], the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School 
and a group of lawyers led by Prof. Charles R. Nesson of Harvard Law 
School. It is not clear that any group will oppose the settlement outright.

...

“What we were establishing was a renewed access to a huge corpus of 
material that was essentially lost in the bowels of a few great 
libraries,” said Richard Sarnoff, former chairman of the Association of 
American Publishers and co-chairman of the American unit of Bertelsmann, 
the parent company of Random House.

...

“No other company can realistically get an equivalent license,” said 
Pamela Samuelson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, 
and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

...

Mr. Darnton of Harvard said he feared that without competition Google 
would be free to “raise the price to unbearable levels.”

But Mr. Macgillivray and Mr. Boni said prices would be kept in check, in 
part by the goal, spelled out in the agreement, to reach as many 
customers as possible.

Some of Google’s rivals are clearly interested in the settlement’s fate. 
Microsoft is helping to finance the research on the settlement at the 
New York Law School institute. James Grimmelmann, an associate professor 
at the institute, said its work was not influenced by Microsoft. 
Microsoft confirmed this but declined to comment further.

Amazon also declined to comment. An unmatchable back catalog could 
eventually make Google a primary source for digital versions of books, 
old and new, threatening other e-book stores.