Google Decision Spurs Research Libraries to Rethink the Path to Digital Access - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Tuesday, a federal judge tossed out the proposed settlement in the lawsuit over Google's vast book-digitization project. Still, research libraries with a stake in that work said they were undeterred. They emphasized that widespread digital access is key to scholars' work, and reiterated their commitment to making as much material available to as many people as possible, whether or not the settlement is revived in some form. And they said they hoped the ruling, by Judge Denny Chin, would galvanize efforts to solve the vexing problem of orphan works, which are under copyright but whose rights-holders are unknown or unfindable....In his ruling, Judge Chin said that clearing up the uncertainty over orphan works' status was best left to Congress rather than to private entities like Google. HathiTrust said it hoped that "the rejection of the settlement will lead immediately to meaningful progress toward orphan-works legislation." There has been renewed talk about a coalition, maybe—but not necessarily—led by Google, to push for such legislation action. "We would throw our weight behind that," said [John P. Wilkin, executive director of the HathiTrust]. "This has to be one of the outcomes" of the case, he said: "a legislative framework—not just in the United States but around the world—on orphan works." Orphan-works bills have been introduced over the past few years, most recently in 2008, but so far none has become law....Orphan works were also very much on the mind of Michael A. Keller, the Stanford University librarian, who released a statement about the ruling on Tuesday. "Congress has considered watered-down solutions for access to these books for years, but only this project imagined universal widespread access to them," Mr. Keller said....One strategy, extended collective licensing, or ECL, has been generating a lot of interest among librarians and copyright reformers, says Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive's BookServer project. He's also a co-founder of the Open Book Alliance, whose members include Amazon.com and Microsoft. (The alliance weighed in against the Google settlement, filing a brief opposing it in 2009.) The ECL approach works like this: Certain uses of copyrighted material—research that does not have a commercial application, for instance—might get a free pass, while more-commercial uses would trigger a licensing fee. The approach took off in Scandinavia, says Mr. Brantley, and has had some success in Europe...."