Re: Google Books, AAP Lawsuit, and Transparency

From: Karen Coyle <lists_at_nyob>
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 11:55:18 -0800
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
>
> It's not entirely clear to me what benefit library partners thought 
> they were getting from their Google agreements in the first place. 
> You'd need to know that to know if they thought that benefit was being 
> removed by the potential settlement. 

My reading of it is that what they stood to lose was access to the scans 
of their own books and to the full text OCR, which they assumed they had 
under fair use. Not that they could show the full text to readers, but 
they could use it to create indexes or do research, with only fair use 
limitations. The settlement threatened to declare the library copies of 
the scans to be illegal. What they got by going in under the Google 
umbrella is that some libraries can keep their full text and can perform 
some minimal functions on the OCR.

> But if library partners knew what benefit they were getting, and 
> wanted to ensure that they continued to get it, they should have put 
> it in their contracts.  I suspect library partners weren't even 
> thinking clearly about what benefit they expected, let alone trying to 
> put it in the contract.

Oh, I think they thought about this very very hard, and that they got 
all of the concessions in their contracts that was possible.

kc

-- 
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
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fx.: 510-848-3913
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Received on Tue Mar 03 2009 - 14:57:50 EST