Library Copyright Alliance releases fourth guide to Google Books proposed settlement following judge’s decision

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) announces the release of “A Guide for the Perplexed Part IV: The Rejection of the Google Books Settlement,” an analysis of the latest decision in the Google Books Search case and its potential effect on libraries. The LCA is comprised of the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).

This Guide is the latest in a series prepared by LCA legal counsel Jonathan Band to help inform the library community about this landmark legal dispute.

In the Guide Part IV, Band explains why the Court rejected the proposed class action settlement, which would have allowed Google to engage in a wide variety of activities using scanned books.

As stated in the Guide, “The court concluded that the settlement was unfair because a substantial number of class members [i.e., authors and publishers] voiced significant concerns with the settlement.… However, the validity of the objections seemed less important to the court than the fact that many class members raised them.”

As for the impact of the decision on libraries, Band writes that while it is too early to say what the parties will do next, “it appears that both the challenges and the opportunities presented to libraries by the settlement when it was announced in the fall of 2008 are growing narrower and more distant.”

Past Guides and other LCA materials related to the case are available on the LCA website.

Contact: Jonathan Band

policybandwidth

(202) 296-5675

jband@policybandwidth.com

Contact: Jenni Terry

Press Officer

ALA Washington Office

(202) 628-8410

jterry@alawash.org

WLA 2009: Canoe the Open Content Rapids

Canoe the Open Content Rapids
Dorothea Salo, UW System Digital Content Group

• http://www.slideshare.net/cavlec/canoe-the-open-content-rapids [under Creative Commons Attribution license]

Instruction

• Digital storytelling - copyright issues over pulling from files found on Google Images - sets a bad example
• Scholarship reasons to provide copyright education, provide proper information sources
• Different from country to country
• Instructors tend to violate copyright, as well as avoid activities that are probably fine

Copyright

• Limited monopoly over original works that are fixed in a tangible medium (includes stuff on Internet)
• It's in the Constitution - not about making money, about promoting "progress of science and the useful arts"
• Life of author + 70 years; 95 years corporate entities
• OK to copy for scholarship, parody/satire, library preservation, classroom use; limited copying for other reasons = "fair use"
• You can: a) sell in whole/part, b) give it away for free, c) license it for free/payment
• Faculty generally fall into (b) without realizing it - they think because they wrote an article, they own it
• Fair use - only way you know for certain is if you're sued and win
• General guidelines do exist
• Legislation has become more and more restrictive; results - culturejamming

Public domain

• Prefer to think of things as "rising" into the public domain, not "falling"
• Google Books - includes items clearly in the public domain (pre-1923), others clearly under copyright, others are "orphan works" because we don't know who owns copyright (or if they're alive etc.)
• Hathi Trust will decide whether items Google is vacillating about are actually in the public domain
• Musopen - building collection of online recordings - raise money for your group to record a piece (long-dead composers, score acquired legally) and upload
• Flickr Commons - photographs in public domain; allows libraries and other digitizers to share and receive comments
• Project Gutenberg - one of the first; scanned, transcribed public domain texts
• Gov docs - work produced by fed employees in course of jobs is in public domain (except classified works); includes images
• State gov docs = depends on the state

Open access

• Includes peer-reviewed works, digital collections, working papers, technical reports, conference presentations, crowd-sourced solutions to mathematical problems
• "Green" open access - "self-archiving" (not really), repositories (Dorothea doesn't like the term)
• "Gold" open access - originally published open access, no subscription fees, no cost to access
• "Mandates" - FACULTY granting to their institutions the right to post their research results online (some places aren't considering publications towards tenure unless they're deposited in repository; controversy over whether open access publications are getting a citation edge); FUNDERS especially federal agencies want taxpayer-funded research results to be available freely to the public; LIBRARIES at research institutions]
• Biggest tool to find OA materials = OAIster (soon to become part of WorldCat); also DOAJ, Google, Google Scholar
• Open Courses - controversial - http://ocwfinder.com
• Learning materials - OER Commons, MERLOT (long-standing) - points to materials stored elsewhere, ODEPO directory
• Creative Commons - generate license granting specific rights for your works (attribution, no derivatives, non-commercial use, requirement to release the new work under the same license)
• Flickr has a Creative Commons search, or Flickr Storm has advanced CC license search
• Music (ccMixter, Incompetech, Jamendo)

To Do

• When you accept a work for digitization, educate the creator and ask for their desired status for the items
• Read all publication agreements, and ask for what you want - Dorothea hasn't heard of any publishers taking back their decision to publish based on copyright addenda
• Instead of libraries and librarians being the "copyright cop" - promote Creative Commons