Re: Questions about Google Books settlement

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

This, of course, is precisely what is happening, and it is 
already underway. I posted a note on this on the Publishing 
Frontier blog: http://pubfrontier.com; the news item that caught 
my attention was the recent announcement that Random House was 
building a POD "portal."

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sandy Thatcher" <sgt3@psu.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 7:44 PM
Subject: Re: Questions about Google Books settlement

> Some interesting thoughts here, including this among others:
>
> Yet another question is what will happen to limitations and
> exceptions to copyright typically granted to libraries. These
> exceptions depend on the works not being commercially available,
> but what if increasingly all works are available for commercial
> use, as in the Google case, von Lohmann asked.
>
> Indeed, it would appear that the settlement provides strong
> incentives for publishers to retrieve rights to their
> out-of-print works--or to resurrect them again in print if rights
> had not reverted--so as to make them "commercially available"
> again under the settlement's definition, which arguably allows
> availability in POD form to qualify (especially if the POD
> edition can be purchased through an online retailer like Amazon).
> Google is providing yet another reason for publishers to take
> advantage of the "long tail" and extend it backward in time,
> which will--as von Lohmann observes--make it more difficult for
> librarians and other users to apply "fair use" and Section 108
> privileges to make reproductions of substantial parts of these
> works.
>
> This not exactly the same as recovering genuinely "orphan works,"
> where even the publishers don't know who owns the rights, but
> there is a significant number of out-of-print, in-copyright works
> that have been languishing simply owing to the economic decisions
> that the older printing technologies obliged publishers to make,
> which digital printing has rendered unnecessary any longer.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press
>
>>New, William. Questions Raised About Google Library Project's
>>Impact On Knowledge Access. Intellectual Property Watch. 26
>>November 2008.
>>
>>"What has been heralded as a breakthrough in the digitisation of
>>human knowledge is also raising questions about how most humans
>>will access that knowledge, according to an expert in copyright
>>and the public interest."
>>
>>Full text at:
>>
>>http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1332
>>
>>Bernie Sloan
>>Sora Associates
>>Bloomington, IN