Berkeley Law School Professor on Google Book Search and Libraries
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.
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.
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