Google Book Settlement: Some Links

[wolfinthewood]

All my recent posts on the Google Book Settlement and my paper The Google Book Settlement and European Authors are currently in Google's search index. Thanks very much to those who gave me support, especially lilithsaintcrow and herbmcsidhe.

It's time for a round-up of other links.

There is a very useful lecture about the Settlement on YouTube. It was delivered in April by Professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California. She memorably punctuates her sentences with a merry cash-register cry of "ker-ching!" every time she mentions the financial benefits the settlement is geared up to bring to Google, the controllers of the new Book Rights Registry, and the law firms advising the plaintiffs.

Prize for the best title goes to Professor James Grimmelmann of New York Law School for his paper Google and the Zombie Army of Orphans.

There’s a class here that consists of all people who don’t realize they’re part of it. Under the guise of this class action, the named plaintiffs have been able to use the huge collection of orphan works copyrights as a bargaining chip. The named plaintiffs negotiated away everyone else’s rights, lining up all those millions of books for Google’s benefit. The orphans have become zombies, raised from the dead by the dark magic of a class action, turned into a shambling army under Google’s sole control.

Professor Grimmelmann and a number of his students have also set up The Public Index, 'a site to study and discuss the proposed Google Book Search settlement'. It includes the full text of the settlement agreement, fully searchable, and with hyperlinks. The hyperlinks link words and phrases to the innumerable special definitions scattered throughout the documents, and make the whole thing much easier to follow. Somebody must have put in a terrific amount of work cross-referencing the documents.

The site also has a very good set of documents and links: including links to essays on the settlement and links to blog posts.

There are more good links at the Great Google Book Grab site: and also a gallery of cartoons and images. I like this one:



For more satire see this blog post by Mike Cane.

The New York agent and attorney Lynn Chu has written several pieces about the Google Book Settlement. There is a list of most of them on this page (right-hand side panel). Her ideas about the settlement have been evolving since her first piece, Google's Book Settlement Is a Ripoff for Authors, but her views on it haven't mellowed.

No one single non-negotiable, no-advance, one-size-fits-all publishing contract can be imposed on all literary works in America. Every creative work has an individual value (or rather, multiple values, relative to every individual person) which varies not only from that of other works, but depends on many factors, like time, and the moment in time one chooses to calculate value. No court has the power to order everyone in the world to sign, at one arbitrary moment, a publishing contract, or worse, “deem” everyone to [have] done so by failing to reply to a private litigation settlement notice, the equivalent of Nigerian spam. – What's Wrong with the Google Book Settlement

I agree with her first statement (with the proviso that the words 'in America', though rhetorically useful to her, are in fact unnecessary). I hope that her second statement is correct.

More links to come later.