From the East Bay Express
By Chris Thompson
... Five years ago, Google began one of the most ambitious projects in the history of human endeavor. Working with universities around the world, including UC Berkeley, the company systematically scanned and digitally archived millions of books.... It's a remarkable resource, one that could make the sum total of the world's knowledge immediately available to the most isolated researcher or the simply curious. And yet ...
Twelve months ago, three East Bay academics slowly began to grow uncomfortable with what Google was doing. The more they looked into the details of the Google Books project, the more they began to conclude that the country could not afford to let Google control humanity's knowledge the way it intended to. For their own individual reasons, in their own distinctive ways, these critics — Peter Brantley, [Law and School of Information Professor] Pamela Samuelson, and linguist [and School of Information Professor] Geoff Nunberg — set out to stop the project, or at least fundamentally change the way it was being carried out.
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Meanwhile, UC Berkeley law and information school professor Pamela Samuelson was just learning about the settlement. As the co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, she has spent years studying how technology affects privacy, copyright, and intellectual property issues. "Most professors during the summer, they do their research, and they don't spend their summers reading things like the Google Books settlement," she said....
Even more significantly, Samuelson helped organize a major conference on the merits of the settlement at [the School of Information at] UC Berkeley in August. Google Books head Dan Clancy was there and did his best to defend the agreement. But once again, the conference aired numerous grievances about the deal in front of the technology press....
"The reason that it happened all at once is that Pam organized this conference," said Geoff Nunberg....
Perhaps more than anyone, Nunberg used the conference to highlight some of the settlement's problems. Like George Lakoff and John McWhorter, Nunberg is a member of that exotic and improbable specie — a celebrity linguist; he's written numerous books and has a regular guest spot on NPR's Fresh Air. At the conference, he pointed out, in amusing and devastating detail, yet another problem with Google's Book archive: it's riddled with mistakes....
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