Although it is being modified, in the interest of better informing students about the Google Books Settlement, Students for Free Culture has solicited the thoughts of a variety of experts who are providing guest posts reflecting on how the settlement will likely impact students.

In this guest post, Derek Slater of Google explains why the settlement is a boon for students and the democratization of culture.

Google Books and our proposed settlement agreement help fulfill copyright’s core objective — opening up access to knowledge and creativity. If approved by the Southern District Court of New York, the settlement will give anyone, anywhere in the U.S., access to millions of books that today are only accessible at a few large universities. Google Books can already help students and scholars track down hard-to-find books, and under this agreement they will be able to read many of those works online as well.

In this way, “[the settlement] will help tear down the geographic and socio-economic barriers that deprive many Americans of equal educational opportunities,” as the United States Students Association stated in a letter to the court. Numerous voices from the civil rights, disability, library and education communities, representing tens of millions of Americans, also strongly support the agreement because it will help equalize access to information.

You can find more specifics about the agreement and its benefits here, but these groups and individuals — the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, National Federation for the Blind, National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, Professor Gregory Crane, and many more — explain the benefits to students better than I ever could.

I want to turn my attention to why Students for Free Culture in particular should care. SFC is among the leading voices for the born-digital generation when it comes to copyright. You have not simply pushed for legislation and hoped that Congress will eventually save the day. Instead, you’ve started campaigns to democratize culture at your own schools, and urged technology companies and content creators to build innovative, win-win solutions that meet users’ evolving values and expectations.

The settlement represents this sort of win-win, a practical way to address difficult problems. This case started when rightsholders sued Google for digitizing libraries’ collections. While Google fully believes that this is an example of fair use that would have been upheld in court (and the settlement does not compromise fair use in any way), we settled the lawsuits because it ensures greater access to out-of-print books and broad benefits for the reading public, libraries, rightsholders, and innovators. With strong privacy protections, users will be able to browse and buy digital copies of millions of books that otherwise might be left behind in the digital age.

For too long, copyright law and a thicket of legal uncertainties have locked up most out-of-print books. As copyright scholar Mark Lemley explains, the problem here is generally not that these books are “orphaned,” with rightsholders that cannot be found.  Instead, they have two findable parents – an author and a publisher – but sorting out who actually owns the rights may be hard. Because the transaction costs of licensing these books is high relative to their uncertain market value, these “neglected” works simply gather dust on libraries’ shelves.

The settlement not only enables Google to make out-of-print works accessible, but it will also make it much easier for anyone to license them. It establishes a non-profit Book Rights Registry that will actively look for rightsholders and can help resolve ownership disputes. As rightsholders come forward, the Registry will make information publicly available about which books have been claimed and by whom, and rightsholders can authorize the Registry to license third-parties, including Google’s competitors.  Over time, we believe a significant portion of books will be claimed.

Of course, a small fraction of books will remain truly orphaned. While these books will be among the least commercially valuable, there is still a strong public benefit in opening access to them, and the settlement is one step to that end.  In addition, as we said in our testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, we will let any other book retailer resell access to each out-of-print book, including orphans, that Google can provide access to under the settlement.

That said, this settlement is not a panacea for the challenge of orphan books or orphan works more generally. Google has long supported effective legislation that would make it easier for everyone to use orphan works, and this is still a top priority of ours.

Some have taken the well-intentioned position that legislative reform would be preferable to approval of the settlement. But, as David Sohn of the Center for Democracy of Technology discussed in a blogpost last week, this misconceives the settlement as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, legislation. And it would mean that these books remain locked up, as everyone waits for Congress to address not only orphans but also the far larger category of neglected books.

With the democratization of so much of our culture within reach, it would be tragic to turn the perfect into the enemy of the good.

– Derek Slater

Previous Posts in this Series

• Introduction

In the less than half a decade that it has existed, Google Book Search has been anything but boring. The service, that allows users to search millions of texts that Google has scanned, has revolutionized the digital information landscape. However, the viability of the service was challenged nearly immediately by authors and publishers who believed it infringed their copyright. Now, after nearly a year of commentary on the resulting settlement between Google and the Authors Guild/Association of American Publishers, the court has received nearly 400 submissions from the public that range from strong support to deep dissatisfaction.

The Google Book Search settlement runs hundreds of pages and can be confusing to the most expert of legal minds, but, in either its current or a modified form, it will have profound effects on how students around the world interact with knowledge. In the interest of better informing students about the settlement, Students for Free Culture has solicited the thoughts of a variety of experts who, over the coming days, will provide guest posts reflecting on how the settlement will likely impact students.

In the meantime, we encourage you to check out the official Google website explaining the settlement and the Public Index, an initiative of New York Law School that has an authoritative collection of information ranging from briefs to forums.

Stay tuned!

[Image Credit]

As you undoubtedly know, President Obama has led an unprecedented era of openness in American governance, and although the record is mixed, there is much reason for hope. One of the more interesting examples of participatory government that has emerged has been the crowdsourcing of citizen input during the transistion period where Americans could submit feedback for the newly elected administration and others could vote for their favorites.

Now, the Office of Public Enagagement has published a PDF of the top suggestions (also available online). It provides a zeitgeist of sorts for the American public, and, excitingly, many of the topics are related to our work at Students for Free Culture. 

A couple commenters desired increased access to knowledge (A2K):

Libraries of all types need our support, 10810 points

“The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of thegreatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from allour history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to thecollective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth ofour awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all betested by how well we support our libraries.” ~Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Carl said it best. Please continue and expand upon the support provided to libraries of all types.

– NJ Busch

From the good folks at Public Knowledge:

Hollywood’s lobbyists are running all over the Hill to sneak in a copyright filtering provision into the stimulus package. The amendment allow ISPs to “deter” child pornography and copyright infringement through network management techniques. The amendment is very, very controversial for a couple of reasons:

1. First, infringement can’t be found through “network management” techniques. There are legal uses for copyrighted works even without permission of the owner.
2. Second, it would require Internet companies to examine every bit of information everyone puts on the Web in order to find those allegedly infringing works, without a hint of probable cause. That would be a massive invasion of privacy, done at the request of one industry, violating the rights of everyone who is online.

You don’t need me to explain how bad this is. What we need is for everyone to contact Congress and voice your dissent. Head over to Public Knowledge and help now!

Students for Free Culture is co-sponsoring the 2008 Sparky Awards, which asks people to make a short video to illustrate the value of information sharing. The first place winner will get a Sparky statuette and $1,000, and there will be some nifty prizes for the runners-up as well. The official list of judges isn’t up yet, but Rich Jones from our Boston University chapter will be one of the judges, and hopefully our chapter members will create some fabulous entries! The winners from last year were pretty excellent (personally I’m partial to “Pri Vetai: Private Eye”), and I’m looking forward to seeing more creative videos about the importance of open access to information Just make sure to get your entry in by the deadline of November 30th, 2008!

If you want to help promote the video contest, you can find some useful materials in the downloads section on the Sparky Awards site, or you could share this promotional video that I threw together:

If you want to download the promo video, you can try grabbing the Ogg Theora version or mp4. Enjoy!

The day after Christmas, President Bush signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), part of which contained a mandate for all research funded by the National Institutes of Health to be made publicly accessible within a year of publication in the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. This is huge news for many reasons, as SPARC’s Peter Suber notes, in particular because

The NIH is the world’s largest funder of scientific research (not counting classified military research). Its budget last year, $28 billion, was larger than the gross domestic product of 142 nations. As my colleague Ray English points out, it’s more than five times larger than all seven of the Research Councils UK combined. NIH-funded research results in 65,000 peer-reviewed articles every year or 178 every day. … Its OA mandate will not only free up an unprecedented quantity of high-quality medical research. It will also make a giant step toward cultivating new expectations –among researchers, funders, governments, and voters– that publicly-funded research should be OA.

Around the same time, the European Research Council also released its guidelines for open access, which affirm academia’s principles of sharing knowledge as widely as possible and make open access mandatory for all ERC-funded research.

Of course, there’s still work to be done. The federal government funds plenty of research through agencies other than the NIH, not to mention research not funded by the government at all. The yearlong embargo in getting the latest medical research is also less than ideal. But this is still a great step forward, one which will hopefully encourage other agencies and individual academics to release their research freely.

Students for Free Culture is proud to have participated, along with many of its member chapters and other organizations, in last February’s National Open Access Day of Action to raise awareness of access to research issues among students and pressure congresspeople to support HR 2764.

Read Students for Free Culture board member Gavin Baker’s analysis of the bill’s passage and the NIH’s subsequent policy changes.

Also, the winner of SPARC’s viral video contest, of which I was a judge, was announced at last weekend’s American Library Association Midwinter Meeting. Check it out:

July 20th, 2007, the US House of Representatives approved a measure directing the National Institute of Health (NIH) to require free, online access to agency-funded research within 12 months of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. Open Access advocates praised the provision, passed with broad, bipartisan support as part of the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill. “This action paves the way for all scientists and citizens to access, use, and benefit from the results of publicly funded biomedical research,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, and a leader of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. 26 Nobel Laureates called for mandatory public access to NIH research in a recent letter to congress, citing the Human Genome Project and benefits of public access to research. Less than 5% of eligible, individual research has become publicly accessible under the current, voluntary NIH Public Access Policy.

We are a member of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, and this is something we’ve been working towards for a long time! You may recall our national day of action for open access, when we tabled and held other events on campuses across the country in support of a similar bill. It’s very gratifying to see this pass the House, and we can only hope that with your help we can make sure this gets through the Senate when that comes to a vote as well.

Last week, our pals at the EFF released the Bloggers’ FAQ on the Freedom of Information Act. The document is the latest addition to the EFF‘s series of legal guides for bloggers. From the announcement:

“Online journalism makes a unique contribution to America’s vibrant culture of free speech,” said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. “Using the Freedom of Information Act is a powerful way to shed light on government activities and foster critical public debate about the discoveries.”

FreeCulture.org supports citizen journalism as part of a free and vibrant media landscape. We believe that all people have the right to open government.

Last March, we organized Blogshine Sunday to highlight bloggers’ experiences gaining access to government information. Efforts like the EFF’s guide will place bloggers and independent journalists on even better footing to hold governments accountable.