From the New York Times "Bits" Blog
Opposition to Google Books Settlement Jells
By Miguel Helft
With a May 5 deadline for filing objections to the Google books settlement looming, opposition to and criticism of the settlement continues to cement.
I recently wrote about concerns among copyright and antitrust scholars and others that the settlement would grant Google a monopoly over millions of so-called orphan books, which are out of print and whose rights holders are unknown or cannot be found. I later gave more details of where the opposition was coming from.
Now some of the opposition is starting to jell....
On Friday, Pamela Samuelson, a well-known copyright expert at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, published a paper that is critical of the settlement for granting Google exclusive access to orphan works. Ms. Samuelson also points out that many authors of orphan works may want to grant far greater access to their own books that would be allowed by the settlement. “If asked, the authors of orphan books in major research libraries might well prefer for their books to be available under Creative Commons licenses or put in the public domain so that fellow researchers could have greater access to them,” Ms. Samuelson wrote.