Open Book Alliance Kicks Off Campaign Against the Google Book Settlement

Countdown to Court Review of Proposed Google Book Settlement

September 4: Deadline for submissions to US District Court September 4: Deadline for authors/rightsholders to opt-out of settlement September 7: European Commission Hearing September 18: Deadline for Dept. of Justice to submit findings to US District Court October 7: Fairness Hearing in US District Court on proposed settlement

"Many startling challenges to copyright and competition policy lie buried in the [Google Book] settlement’s 300+ pages," writes Peter Brantley and Gary Reback in Opening the Book as their Open Book Alliance launches it's PR campaign. Challenges include the following:

The settlement is bad for consumers and book-lovers – It deliberately thwarts competition in the emerging e-books market, creating a digital book monopoly that will inevitably lead to fewer choices and higher prices for consumers of digital books.  It would allow a group of erstwhile competitors to collectively set prices and leave Google as the only company with a the right to copy, display or sell digital versions of orphan works (books for which authors or rights holders cannot be identified or located).  Consumers would be better served by a competitive market for digital books that is available to everyone on non-discriminatory terms.  The settlement also contains no privacy commitments to ensure that Google doesn’t use its awareness of what books people are reading to make unfair profit, or doesn’t share its intimate knowledge with commercial interests or governments. Finally, the settlement is carefully structured to ensure that all of the digital content will be available to Google and Google’s search engine.  This will enhance and reinforce Google’s already dominant market power in the internet search market while making the digital books less available and less findable by users of other search engines.
 
The settlement is bad for libraries and schools: While a handful of large and well-funded university libraries participated in the Google book-scanning effort, many other educational institutions and libraries will be forced to pay monopoly prices for access to a wide swath of knowledge, straining already-stretched budgets and creating a system of haves and have-nots in our nation’s education system. Community libraries would get at a single terminal to Google’s private book database, and libraries serving our nation’s children in K-12 schools would get absolutely nothing. The settlement widens the digital divide by limiting access to digital books in financially hard-hit communities that have budget-constrained libraries.
 
The settlement is bad for authors and small publishers: Unless they act to opt out of the proposed settlement by Google’s deadline, authors and other writers lose rights to the fruits of their labor—a future in which they have no negotiating rights for the value of their work. Moreover, the proposed settlement would line the pockets of a handful of lawyers, who collectively would receive more than $45 million, at the expense of millions of authors and small publishers upon whose creativity and hard work the private book monopoly would be built.

The settlement sets a dangerous and unprecedented process precedent. The proposed settlement far exceeds the bounds of a typical legal settlement. It privatizes important copyright and public policy decisions. It abuses class action procedure to create an exclusive joint venture between Google, AAP and the Authors’ Guild, strengthening Google’s dominance in search and search advertising and creating a private monopoly for the sale of digitized books.

The official launch of the Open Book Alliance was August 26th. See Diverse Coalition Unites To Counter Google Book Settlement. Members of the "Sour Grapes Alliance" are expected to file individual objections to the Court by September 4. See the above sidebar for the schedule leading up to the Court's "fairness hearing" and LLB's earlier coverage of the Open Book Alliance: Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon to Oppose Google Book Settlement and Axis of Hatred to Join Open Book Alliance in Effort to Derail Google's Book Rights Registry.

Opposition to the Book Rights Registry. The anticompetitive consequences of the Book Rights Registry are bad for libraries and schools but only 21.5% of librarians oppose the Settlement according to a recent Publishers Weekly survey. See LLB's post, Are Rank-and-File Librarians Sitting on the Fence Over the Google Book Settlement? Librarians who are still sitting on the fence might want to read UC Berkeley law prof Pamela Samuelson's very accessible series of posts on The Huffington Press. For more, see

• Samuelson's Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement

• Grimmelmann's How to Fix the Google Search Settlement

• Sag's The Google Book Settlement and the Fair Use Counterfactual

See also Jonathan Band's A Guide for the Perplexed Part II: The Amended Google-Michigan Agreement [JH]