Daniel Clancy, an engineer and director at Google Books, provided some of the most candid reasons for the company’s most recent settlement proposal with major authors and publishers in a story on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Google hopes to benefit from it by improving our search. And we expect that we will make some money as we sell the books. ”
[Snip]
Clancy continues to cloud the issue and skirt the monopolistic aspects of Google business: “There’s nothing we’re doing that prevents anyone from doing the exact same thing.”
On the contrary, the settlement provides Google with the right to sell unclaimed orphan works with no checks and balances. As Pam Samuelson, a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley said, “[Google] has basically turned this project into a bookstore, rather than a library.”
The Open Book Alliance fully agrees with Clancy when he said, “And the one thing that I strongly think is the wrong answer is that we should, you know, lock all this stuff up, so that nobody can discover them and nobody can use these books.”
If you would like to view the complete PBS video and also have access to the transcript, it's all available here.
This segment aired on 12/30/2009.
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