U.C. Professors Air Google Book Search Settlement Concerns

"The professors want some changes to the deal that they consider to be more friendly to academic authors. 'Specifically, we are concerned that the Authors Guild negotiators likely prioritized maximizing profits over maximizing public access to knowledge, while academic authors would have reversed those priorities,' the authors wrote in an Aug. 13 letter to the New York district court slated to review the settlement....The professors also request provisions for 'open access choices.' Specifically, they request that Google make its Book Search database freely available and transparent to researchers who want to determine the public domain status of a book. The faculty also asks that there be a mechanism to let academic authors of orphan books license their books to the public domain or Creative Commons."