Law Librarian Blog

Research Finds Positive, Not Negative, Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects Using GBS as a Case in Point

From the abstract of the article by FIU Law prof Hannibal Travis, Estimating the Economic Impact of Mass Digitization Projects on Copyright Holders: Evidence from the Google Book Search Litigation [SSRN], 57 Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA __ (2010):

The Article aims at a preliminary estimate of the economic impact of mass digitization projects, using GBS as a case in point. It finds little support for the much-discussed hypothesis of the Association of American Publishers and Google’s competitors that the mass digitization of major U.S. libraries will reduce the revenues and profits of the most-affected publishers. In fact, the revenues and profits of the publishers who believe themselves to be most aggrieved by GBS, as measured by their willingness to file suit against Google for copyright infringement, increased at a faster rate after the project began, as compared to before its commencement. The rate of growth by publishers most affected by GBS is greater than the growth of the overall U.S. economy or of retail sales. Thus, the very publishers that have sued Google have seen their revenues grow faster than retail sales or the U.S. economy as a whole (measured by gross domestic product). This finding parallels some of the research that has been done since the Napster case on the economic impact of peer-to-peer file sharing on sales of recorded music. Future studies may provide a more granular estimate of the economic impact of frequent downloads or displays of pages of particular books on the sales of such books.

Hat tip to The Laboratorium. [JH]

WSJ Investigates the Online Tracking Industry: Web Privacy, What's That?

Surfing the Internet starts a process that passes information about you and your interests to tracking companies and advertisers. The Wall Street Journal has been investigating what it describes as "one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet ... the business of spying on consumers" in a series of stories with the type of technical specificity one would not usually expect from a non-IT publication. To view the entire WSJ series, visit On Web's Frontier, Anonymity in Name Only. Highly recommended. On this topic, see also Mark Giangrande's recent LLB post, Is Web Privacy Dead? Probably. [JH