Until the next major event and our next press review, we will continue to post Settlement 2.0 news and analysis with a focus on stories, analysis, and opinion that has a library angle to it.
We begin with this analysis of competition by Fred von Lohmann at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It includes an entire section dealing with institutional subscriptions titled, "Monopoly Pricing of the Institutional Subscription Database?"
One of the commercial services that Google is authorized to provide under the proposed settlement is the "Institutional Subscription Database" (aka "ISD"), which will provide "all-you-can-eat" access to the corpus of scanned books. The chief customers for the ISD are likely to be universities (the same folks who are providing Google with the books to be scanned), for whom instant digital access to every word in every book in Google's collection is likely to be very compelling.
The big question is whether, over time, the ISD will become the one database that no university can do without, and the one database with no market substitute (again, because Google will be the only company who can provide a comprehensive corpus without fear of copyright liability, for the reasons explained above). This, of course, is a recipe for monopolistic price gouging, as a group of academic authors led by Prof. Pam Samuelson have pointed out. Over time, universities could face spiraling prices as Google and the Registry conspire to maximize their revenues on the ISD product.
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