WORTH READING Pam Samuelson response to Sergey Brin's recent oped in the NYT

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Pam Samuelson <pam () ischool berkeley edu>
Date: October 13, 2009 7:37:36 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: you might be interested in my response to Sergey Brin's  
recent oped in the NYT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-samuelson/google-books-is-not-a-lib_b_317518.html

"Unlike the Alexandria library or modern public libraries, the Google  
Book Search (GBS) initiative is a commercial venture that aims to  
monetize millions of out-of-print books, many of which are "orphans,"  
that is, books whose rights holders cannot readily be found after a  
diligent search. David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, has  
estimated that about twenty per cent of the books in the GBS corpus  
are orphans, but other estimates are higher. Even twenty per cent,  
however, equals millions of books. Under the settlement announced last  
October, Google and the publishers and authors who sued it for  
infringement agreed to hold on to the revenues made from sales and  
licenses of orphan books for five years, but thereafter to pay the  
monies out to registered rights holders--that is, to people who had  
neither written nor published the books in question, a pure windfall  
for them. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has objected to this  
part of the deal, as have several states."


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