Michigan has similar rights to UC under the current contract. Google doesn’t limit our use of our copies of the scans, but copyright law does. The great thing about the settlement is that it makes it possible to use the scans for reading, both on campus and off.

Absent the settlement, we can make lawful uses (a good thing) but these are highly limited by copyright law, and we would have negotiate the kinds of uses libraries want to make — allowing their users to read and annotate the works, and the like — rightsholder by rightsholder, if you could find the rightsholders.

Paul

The Settlement says that the host libraries get a full set of their scans, but can only use them for “non consumptive” research– they can only provide their people limited access, unless they subscribe just like everyone else.

But the specific UC agreement gives the libraries all of their scans, with the only limitation being that they can’t sell it, charge for it, or give away more than 10 percent of it to any other institution.

What this means is that– in theory– UC could provide full downloads of copyrighted works to their users, for free– but only to their own people.

Of course, if they did, they’d get hit with lawsuits, not being under the protection of the Google umbrella provided by the Settlement.

But maybe not? It does open up to UC users the possibility that they can get free downloads, and being that UC owns copies of these books, would they really be infringing copyrights anywhere if they did provide this service, without paying into the corpus?

I don’t see anything in the Settlement that restricts this, or amends the previous institutional contracts that Google has negotiated so far with the host libraries.

I am going to take a small exception with one statement: “But his idea that there was any possibility that Congress and the Library of Congress might have implemented that vision in the 1990s is a utopian fantasy.”

The most influential mentor of my grad school days here at the University of Michigan was Manfred Kochen. I still have his picture in my office. The final six months of his life were primarily spent as a consultant to and scholar at the Library of Congress. This was in 1989, and he told me himself that the focus of the work there was his effort to persuade LC that the technology was available NOW (meaning then) to scan and make available online the full contents of the Library of Congress. He wrote a substantial report in support of this concept, but the report is actually not even available at the Library of Congress, at least according to my repeated efforts to locate it there and communications to me from their librarians. The report was:

Kochen, Manfred (1988) “Extending the human record”, report to the Library of Congress, Automated Systems Office, Washington.

The only copy I’ve been able to locate is in the papers of JA Goodman in the archives at the University of Calgary in Canada. http://www.ucalgary.ca/archives/Finding%20Aids/GoodmanFindAid.html

(Hint, hint, I want very much to see a copy. Fred promised me one, but he died before actually sending it.)

In any case, a substantial case was made in the late 1980s for the comprehensive digitization of the collections of the Library of Congress during the 1990s. That this is not commonly known is not surprising given the untimely death of its author and that LC did not preserve in their collections the copies they received.

While I understand the desire to limit printing, it seems technically feasible to allow some sort of secure authentication to allow access on any computer.

Thanks for this thoughtful response to Bob Darnton’s article. Bob missed, and thus you missed in your reply, the real tangle over Google’s complete control over this new market in out-of-print book rights: the price that Google will set to its advantage is the royalty payment to copyright holders, not any price to libraries. There is no price for libraries, as I understand it, in the settlement.

Google has established a compulsory license system sui generis, without legislative backing and the necessary exemptions from anti-trust. So it’s going to be thorny.

The fact is that Google has all the power in this relationship. It can dictate terms to all parties as time goes on and Google changes its priorities. The current details matter a lot less than the structure of the settlement, which is very dangerous. That it is dangerous does not mean it is pernicious. Early airplanes were dangerous without being pernicious. But we had to work out a lot of norms, laws, and technologies before we had a viable air traffic system. So goes this system.

Writer, publisher, and reader beware.

Siva