The Google Book Settlement

The JISC have made a summary of the proposed Google Book Settlement available for comment on Writetoreply (a service that I really like by the way), along with a series of questions that might usefully be considered by interested parties. Thanks to Naomi Korn and Rachel Bruce for their work on this.

Not knowing a great deal about the proposed settlement I didn't really feel able to comment but in an effort to get up to speed I decided to put together a short set of Powerpoint slides, summarising my take on the issues, based largely on the JISC text.

Here's what I came up with:

Of course, my timing isn't ideal because the proposed review meeting on the 7th October has now been replaced with a 'status update' meeting [PDF] that will "decide how to proceed with the case as expeditiously as possible". Ongoing discussion between Google and the US Department of Justice looks likely to result in changes to the proposed settlement before it gets to the review stage.

Nonetheless, I think it's useful to understand the issues that have led up to any revised settlement and in any case, it was a nice excuse to put together a set of slides using CC images of books from Flickr!

Comments

[Kevin Ashley]

A very useful summary - thanks to you, and to Rachel and Naomi. I only wish I had read it 12 hours earlier - I was being asked questions about this at an event today and was feeling very uninformed at the time. I can answer them now!

[Debbie]

There is a very interesting viewpoint expressed at http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/.