Library Boy: Three Years of the Google Book Settlement

Walt Crawford devotes the entire August 2012 issue of his Cites & Insights publication to what happened to the proposed Google Book Settlement.

Google has been digitizing millions of books to create a massive online library / bookstore but the plans ran into legal difficulties when US author and publisher groups launched a copyright violation lawsuit against the search giant. A proposed settlement was rejected by the courts:

"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 (...)"

"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."

Some of the topics Crawford covers include monopoly and antitrust; privacy and confidentiality; the public domain, open access, copyright; libraries and metadata; authors and publishers.

Earlier Library Boy posts about the Google Book Settlement include: