Dean's Lecture

Why the Google Book Settlement Failed – and What Comes Next?

Wednesday, April 13, 2011
4:00 pm to 5:30 pm
Pamela Samuelson
More than a year after the Google Book Settlement fairness hearing, Judge Chin ruled that the settlement was not fair and could not be approved. This talk will explain why I think the failure of this settlement was inevitable. It will also discuss the options available after the failure of the settlement and why some of these options are more likely or desirable than others.

Pamela Samuelson is a Chancellor's Professor of Information and of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and an advisor to the Samuelson High Technology Law & Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall. She teaches courses on intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy. She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies pose for traditional legal regimes, especially for intellectual property law. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Contributing Editor of Communications of the ACM, a past Fellow of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and an Honorary Professor of the University of Amsterdam. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Open Source Application Foundation, as well as a member of the Advisory Board for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

A 1971 graduate of the University of Hawaii and a 1976 graduate of Yale Law School, Samuelson practiced law as a litigation associate with the New York law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher before turning to academic pursuits. From 1981 through June 1996 she was a member of the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, from which she visited at Columbia, Cornell, and Emory Law Schools. She has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since 1996.

Last updated:

August 23, 2016