This link has been bookmarked by 7 people . It was first bookmarked on 30 Oct 2008, by someone privately.
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03 Feb 09
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14 Jan 09
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02 Nov 08
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31 Oct 08
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Google will establish and run a not-for-profit rights registry to allow rights holders to claim or establish control over out-of-print works. This registry would serve as a helpful database through which scholars and publishers may find rights holders to clear rights. As of today, there is no good database for such book rights for most of the books published in the 20th century. So this has the potential to be a major boon to research and publishing. In addition, it can help rights holders accrue royalties (meager thought they might be) by exploiting a market that currently does not work efficiently or effectively -- reprints or selections from out-of-print works. Google is doing what the U.S. Copyright Office should have done years ago. As usual, Google is making up for public failure -- the opposite of market failure.
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Isn't this a tremendous anti-trust problem? Google has essentially set up a huge compulsory licensing system without the legislation that usually makes such systems work. One of the reasons it took a statutory move to create compulsory licensing for musical compositions was that Congress had to explicitly declare such a consortium and the organizations that run it (ASCAP, BMI) exempt from anti-trust laws. In addition, this proposed system excludes many publishers (such as university presses) and many authors (those not in the Authors' Guild). More importantly, this system excludes the other major search engines and the one competitor Google has in the digital book race: the Open Content Alliance. Don't they now have a very strong claim for an anti-trust action? [Oh, and please note that Google CEO Eric Schmidt was out campaigning for the likely next president last week ... coincidence?]
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From the beginning, this has seemed to be a major example of corporate welfare. Libraries at public universities all over this country (including the one that employs me) have spent many billions of dollars collecting these books. Now they are just giving away access to one company that is cornering the market on on-line access. They did this without concern for user confidentiality, preservation, image quality, search prowess, metadata standards, or long-term sustainability. They chose the expedient way rather than the best way to build and extend their collections.
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30 Oct 08
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