Cites and Insights -- It Was Never a Universal Library: Three Years of the Google Book Settlement

Use the link to access the complete newsletter from Cites and Insights, providing a complete status update on the Google Books Settlement. “Remember the Google Books settlement? It was going to settle a four-year-old pair of lawsuits (four years old then, eight years old now) against Google (by the Association of American Publishers, AAP, and the Authors Guild, AG) asserting that Google was infringing on copyright through its two-line snippets from in-copyright books scanned in the Google Library Project—and by the scanning itself. Later, a third group representing media photographers also sued Google for the same actions. A proposed settlement was announced in October 2008. Lots of people had lots of things to say about it—-not unreasonably, since it had major implications. The March 2009 Cites & Insights is a 30-page discussion of the settlement and what was being said about it. An essay in the July 2009 issue addressed the misuse of the English language by some commentators. I assumed—as I believe most other observers did—that the settlement might be modified slightly but would probably be approved within a year or two, maybe even faster than that. Now? The settlement (modified) is dead: The judge struck it down as being unfair. Most of those who were commenting on it (including me) really didn’t deal with what turned out to be the core issue: You can’t substantially transform copyright law by settling a class action lawsuit. We are, in some ways, back to square one after the better part of a decade. There will assuredly be more developments over the next (year? five years? decade?), but given the clear death of the settlement itself, I thought this would be a good time to update the situation.If you’ve managed to ignore the settlement (called GBS for convenience, as it is by at least one of the truly knowledgeable commentators) so far, I’ll suggest reading my March 2009 overview and possibly a few of the items it points to. I’m not going to rehash it—as it is, this discussion is longer than the earlier one, even as it’s fundamentally a story of failure.Or is it? Maybe the failure of GBS is a success in other areas—including (potentially) areas such as fair use and sensible planning for library futures.This is a long set of notes and comments (cites & insights). It strikes me that the topic and complexity deserve that length—but note that I’m offering much briefer excerpts and comments on most items than I normally would in this sort of roundup. After two sets of general notes and overviews (one before the settlement was rejected, one after) I’m breaking the discussion down by topics rather than chronologically...”