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"Excuse me, where is the Google Terminal?"

As expected, the proposed Google Book Search settlement has led to a lot of scrutiny, criticism and questions. Here is a link to the 125 page Settlement Agreement(without attachments; pdf). Here is a link to the page that holds the full agreement which, with attachments, is over 300 pages long).

Both Larry Lessig (“IMHO, this is a good deal that could be the basis for something really fantastic”) and Wade Roush(“Book Search settlement contains some major disappointments”) have taken a first crack at trying to decipher this settlement (Roush – “exhaustive, labyrinthine”) and figure out who, amongst the many stakeholders, are the winners and losers.

Here is a particularly interesting paragraph from Wade Roush’s article:

. . . [T]he devil . . . is in the details. If you read the agreement, you’ll see that it restricts each public library to exactly one Google terminal. Tens of millions of books online—but at any given moment, no more than 16,543 people are allowed to read them without paying. (That’s how many public libraries and branches there are in the United States, according to the American Library Association—one for every 18,500 Americans.)

So, America’s librarians will be hearing these words for generations to come: “Excuse me, where is the Google Terminal?”  Or perhaps the librarians will receive phone calls asking: “Hi, how long is the line for the Google Terminal?”

Much more to follow.

[n.b. It appears that Harvard is unhappy with the terms of the proposed agreement, and is withdrawing in-part from its participation in the scanning project]

Welcome to the Metaverse

Wade Roush (technology journalist and chief correspondent at Xconomy) wrote an extraordinary article in the MIT Technology Review in 2007 which I’ve had in my “must re-read” pile for a while. Recently I picked it up and noticed that the article is accessible in full on the Technology Review web site (free registration required).

Here is a brief excerpt from the article, modestly entitled Second Earth:

[w]ithin 10 to 20 years–roughly the same time it took for the Web to become what it is now–something much bigger than either of these alternatives [Second Earth or Google Earth] may emerge: a true Metaverse. In Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, a classic of the dystopian “cyberpunk” genre, the Metaverse was a planet-size virtual city that could hold up to 120 million avatars, each representing someone in search of entertainment, trade, or social contact. The Metaverse that’s really on the way, some experts believe, will resemble Stephenson’s vision, but with many alterations. It will look like the real earth, and it will support even more users than the Snow Crash cyberworld, functioning as the agora, labo­ratory, and gateway for almost every type of information-based pursuit. It will be accessible both in its immersive, virtual-reality form and through peepholes like the screen of your cell phone as you make your way through the real world. And like the Web today, it will become “the standard way in which we think of life online,” to quote from the Metaverse Roadmap, a forecast published this spring by an informal group of entrepreneurs, media producers, academics, and analysts.

This is extraordinary, futuristic stuff, but it reads like a valid prediction of the future. Click here to read the uncut article (which is over 7,000 words). If you have trouble accessing this page (perhaps because you need to register), start here to register and navigate to it.

Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall's 2008 Annual Address

Chief Justice Margaret Marshall

Chief Justice Margaret Marshall

Thank you, President McIntyre for the honor, and great pleasure, of addressing this annual meeting.

Fair and independent courts need dedicated lawyers. The rule of law needs both. That is why, among so many reasons, I am delighted to be here: to thank this Bar Association, to thank each of you, for partnering in justice with our courts.

This has been a turbulent year. In politics. In terms of climate change. And now, a financial crisis of unparalleled dimensions. The cataclysm on Wall Street reverberates on Beacon Street. Revenue sources for state government are fast declining, and predicted to decline further. … Continue Reading

"Yesterday's Masters of the Universe are Today's Cosmic Dust" or "I Have Found a Flaw in How the World Works"

I’ve heard this quote attributed to Alan Abelson of Barron’s, but who knows, it may be from Kansas. Maybe Abelson used to listen to Kansas.

In any event, it came to mind when I heard that the Maestro, a Master of the Universe if there ever was one, spoke thus before Congress last week:

REP. WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality —

MR. GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.

REP. WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology was not right. It was not working.

MR. GREENSPAN: Precisely. That’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

Google Wins (I mean settles) Google Book Search Copyright Suits

Google said Tuesday that it has agreed to pay $125 million to settle the copyright litigation brought by book authors and publishers over Google’s project to digitize and show snippets of in-copyright books without the explicit permission of copyright owners. (See 1 2 3 for more on Google Book Search).

$125 million? Peanuts to Google. Less than peanuts. We don’t know all the terms and possible restrictions yet, but it sounds like this is a huge win for Google, which is now free to continue its project of digitizing the world’s books (or at least those under the control of the settling parties) without the threat of injunction.

Google press release here.

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[Update (10/29/08)]: Google explains here how it expects this settlement to affect Google Book Search. Some excerpts from that page are (emphasis added) :

Once approved, this agreement will allow us and our publishing industry partners to greatly expand the number of books that you can find, preview and buy through Google. …

Once this agreement has been approved, you’ll be able to purchase full online access to millions of books. This means you can read an entire book from any Internet-connected computer, simply by logging in to your Book Search account, and it will remain on your electronic bookshelf, so you can come back and access it whenever you want in the future. …

Because this agreement resolves a United States lawsuit, it directly affects only those users who access Book Search in the U.S.; anywhere else, the Book Search experience won’t change. Going forward, we hope to work with international industry groups and individual rightsholders to expand the benefits of this agreement to users around the world.

Well, wake up Amazon! Perhaps Google will be able to sell electronic rights to these works through Amazon and the Kindle, in which case the Kindle’s library will soar from fewer than 200,000 to many millions.

The non-U.S. implications of this settlement are unclear in light of this comment –

First, if Google’s “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible,” as it states on that page, this settlement allows it to succeed with only about 5% of the world’s population if it is limited to the U.S. But, if trying to determine whether works created under U.S. law are under copyright, and if so identify their owners was difficult, the task of making these determinations for non-U.S. works seems almost insurmountable.

Second, Google is in fact digitizing many non-U.S. books. How can these books be included in this settlement (presumably they are subject to non-U.S. copyright laws and controlled by non-U.S. publishers)? Will they be excluded from the Book Search program, even to U.S. users of Google?

Returning to the U.S., and the announced settlement, what’s stopping some of the class members from opting out of the settlement? Some authors or publishers may not be happy with a loss of this magnitude this settlement. Google may not be done with even the U.S. legal issues just yet.

There are many questions in the wake of this announced settlement. Given the magnitude of this undertaking it may take many years, even decades, for all of the legal issues associated with Book Search to be resolved.