liber and the google books settelement
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LIBER and the Google Book Settlement
Wouter SchallierExecutive Director
About LIBER
www.libereurope.eu
The largest network of European research libraries: almost 400 institutions, from over 40 countries
Mission: to represent and promote the interests of European research libraries, and of their users: students and researchers
Google Book Settlement
Would end the copyright infringement lawsuit brought against G. in 2005
G. would continue scanning in-copyright books, Publishers and authors would agree not to sue
G. will earn money through advertising and through selling access to full text in copyright not commercially available books
Books Right Registry: G. 37%, publishers/authors 63% of revenues
The digital information landscape
Research and education are the pillars of the European knowledge economy
The Google Book Search programme has the potential to provide public access to a digital library of millions of books
This could be an unprecedented source for the advancement of research, learning and human development
The digital information landscape (2)
Research libraries have been struggling to get funding for digitisation projects
Important initiatives, like Europeana, have been taken but a lot of work remains…
So we wellcome all efforts to digitise information resources and to make them publicly available
BUT
Territorial limits
Serious competitive disadvantage for Europe
The proposed settlement only applies in the USA
Users outside the USA will only have access to 3 snippets of text
Example: a book written by a French author, published in USA, can be digitised by G., but will not be accessible to the author nor to his colleagues
Risk of abuse of dominant position
Size of project: 30 million books, $750 million
Large proportion of the world’s heritage of books in digital format will be under control of a single corporate entity
No exclusivity, but Google has a 5 year lead
No free access for R&E
Public and research libraries, upon request, will be able to give free public access on one terminal per building
This limitation goes against what the researcher/learner expects in terms of access to information: from their PC over the network
No criteria for non-consumptive research
DB containing digitised books: unique corpus for computational analysis and research
Settlement: “2 institutions may host this corpus of the purposes of non-consumptive research by qualified user”
What are the criteria?
No mechanism for non-American researchers
No long-term preservation strategy
Google forever?
No provisions for the long-term preservation of the entire DB
How can libraries play their role of trusted curators of scholarly information?
No unified copyright regime in EU
The G. Books Settlement precludes the needs and the interests of the European user
Plethora of national legislation in Europe concerning copyright makes it difficult to adopt a Settlement in EU
Risk of censorship
G. may exclude 15% of scanned books from the DB!
G. is likely to come under pressure from interest groups and governments to exclude books that contain “undesirable” information
Privacy
Some of the services to be offered imply that G. will collect and retain information of users’ activities
Settlement does not specify how users’ privacy will be protected
Risk of diminishing users’ rights
Contracts, like the Google Book Settlement, too often override statutory exceptions and limitations in ways that diminish user’s rights
Thank you! Questions?
Wouter SCHALLIERLIBER Executive Director
M: +31 6 29 04 79 52E: [email protected]
W: www.libereurope.eu