It could be a win-win for people, but Google has a few issues to resolve first.

A quick glance at their scanning agreement with the UC Libraries shows that this 'out-of-print for a fee' scheme was the basis for the whole Google Books idea in the first place. The older public domain scans were just the part that they had to do, to get ahold of the profitable newer stuff. It was never about "doing good" or spreading "knowledge."

But there's a dilemma. The scanning agreements with these libraries explicitly require that they release all of the public domain books for free. But American copyright is confusing-- even many books published before 1964 are not protected, because their copyrights were not renewed properly when they expired after 28 years. This public domain window involves potentially millions of books published between the clearly exempt year of 1922 all the way to 1964.

This means that Google is going to have to research the copyright status of every book published between those dates. Otherwise, unwitting patrons could be in a position of paying for scans and downloads that they are supposed to get-- legally-- for free.

Is Google up to the task, or are more lawsuits going to be necessary before they willingly release all of the PD works they have on file?

jim-

i think you have a few things wrong in this particular analysis.

google always knew they'd have to assess the status of orphans.
so that's not an issue.

> The older public domain scans were just the part that
> they had to do, to get ahold of the profitable newer stuff.
> It was never about "doing good" or spreading "knowledge."

i think you're mistaken; i still say google's intentions were good.

i think this settlement is _flawed_, but i am not willing to believe
that google was "fooling us" all along. they were put on the spot
by a lawsuit brought by old-guard business-models, and they
decided it would be advantageous to them to settle the lawsuit.

no, i _didn't_ think they would sell out the public in the process,
and they sure did. so i am squawking about that. very loudly...

but there's no reason to doubt the stated goal: google wants to
index the world's knowledge, so they need to index the books.
heck, that's where most of the knowledge lies. so it's obvious.

the problem is, this lawsuit made them look to create a solution
for the other side, as compensation, so they provided a means
to create an income-stream out of their long-discarded content.
and -- in addition -- to create a mechanism to put new content
into the world on a pay-per-view basis, and to collect the cash,
infrastructure the publisher/author side would otherwise have to
create for themselves (and which they know they cannot create,
not with the same success that could be experienced by google).

google always knew they'd have to assess the status of orphans.
so that's not an issue.

the issue was always the material that is _in-copyright_, and
furthermore, the copyright-owner is making a loud claim to it.

both "sides" (as if there are only 2 sides to every story; if you're
smart, you know that every story has eight-nine sides) always
knew that a compulsory licensing scheme was the only way out.

the only question that makes a difference is: "what's the price?"

by failing to mention what it is, only specifying who will pay it,
this "agreement" does a very bad job of answering the question.

the public -- individuals and public libraries -- and institutional
libraries (especially those at uninvolved colleges or universities)
bear the financial brunt of this "settlement", and that is unfair...

-bowerbird