December 14: supplemental notices about the amended agreement to be sent
January 28: objections to amended agreement be filed with the court
January 28: opt in date for those members of the class who had previously opted out
February 18: hearing to determine whether the agreement is “fair, reasonable and adequate”

Lawsuit filed in October, 2005. Google believed that digitizing the books and making digital snippets was “fair use”, and that belief was never actually tested because of settlement. Journals, periodicals, letters, manuscripts, music, lyrics excluded. Google’s use of books is limited to the geographic limits of the US. For in-print books the rights holder must opt in and reverse for out of print books.

Probably the largest class action suit ever undertaken and is the largest notice program ever done. Required that every library in the US and every university be given an access terminal to view the works. Book Rights Registry will be initially funded with $34 million.

Registry: identify and locate rightsholders; set up mechanisms for rightsholders to work with Google, distribute revenues to rightsholders, licenses other organizations, dispute resolution.

Foreign objections: no/inadequate consultation, imperfections in notice process, large anti-Google sentiment (Google makes people very nervous in Europe) and anti-American feeling caused by being afraid of American hegemony.

How do you know if your out of print book has been scanned? There is a settlement administrator’s website that has all the books listed.

In response to my question he doesn’t know why New Zealand was excluded. Same question arises with South Africa.

Success of Registry will depend on its ability to handle vast amounts of metadata relating to the works.

In 10 months of massive claiming haven’t seen massive opt outs or massive removals, as a matter of fact just the opposite.

Can’t buy the published output of the 20th Century! Current front list is well digitized as is the corpus of books before the 20th Century. This is the missing link.

While not completely against the revised agreement the BA said: “The BA would have far preferred UK titles and orphan works to have been excluded, but as it seems this is not going to be the case, the Association is pleased that a number of considerable concessions, at least, have been made following our representations.”

(Via The Bookseller)

The stated reason was that the Open Content Alliance changed their representative at the last minute from a professor to a lawyer. Google did not want to put an engineer up against a lawyer, and it was too late to find a Google lawyer to take the engineer’s place.

Naturally, each side is claiming the other’s behavior is ridiculous.

The Europeans have been, on the whole, non-committal so far, except the German Boersenverein (booksellers’ association) has expressed concern about being left out – even though they previously said they didn’t want to be in.

The poor New Zealanders must really feel strange as the point of including Canada, Australia and England was that they had a similar heritage and legal system to the US. I wonder whose heritage New Zealand has?

Related: An unpopular view of Google Books, by Downes.

Disclosure/reminder: I own a speck of Google stock as a long-term retirement investment, though you’d never know it from some of the posts I’ve done on the proposed Google Books settlement.

In the UK, however, the Publishers Association, which previously had taken a neutral position, is now supporting the agreement as revised. Despite this, some members, including Hachette UK won’t go along and are still against the agreement.

No matter what the court decides I’m sure we are in for a series of appeals which may very will delay this for a couple of years. I would not even be surprised to see this whole thing eventually reach the US Supreme Court on the basis that this is not the proper set of facts for a class action.

You can find a comprehensive press review along with links to the actual documents at this Resource Shelf posting.

* Crain’s New York Business has a short piece on September 2009 e-book sales at Random House seeing a dramatic 700 perent increase over the same period in 2008—largely due to Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Just imagine how much sales might go up if they actually sold their e-books at reasonable prices!

* PC World Magazine has a review of the bebook Mini e-book reader. They like it, on the whole, but note it has some interface issues.

* Buzzmachine writes about Rupert Murdoch’s nose-cutting face-spiting decision to start blocking Google. A German research group has analyzed how much damage Google would take from such publisher search-blocking, and come to about the same conclusion as the bulldozer operator from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: almost none at all.

* While this is not related directly to e-books, Wired has a piece looking at a “copyright time bomb” that will soon be giving the music industry more headaches. A 1976 copyright law had provisions that will allow recording artists to reclaim the copyright to their works from the record labels that currently hold them.

The article claims that this applies to all forms of copyrighted material, not just music, but does not go into any details as to how this could apply to non-musical works.

1. Foreign language works are out: the scope is limited to works registered with the US Copyright Office and books published in Canada, Australia and the U.K. There will be representatives from those countries on the Book Rights Registry board.

2. There will be an independent court-approved fiduciary who will represent rights-holders of unclaimed books and act to protect their interests, including licensing their works.

3. The Books Rights Registry is not required to search for rights-holders who have not come forward.

4. Third parties will be able to sell access to all settlement works, including orphans, even though Google will host the titles.

5. Revenue models have been limited to print on demand, file download and subscriptions.

6. Rights-holders may make their works available for free.

7. The Google’s most favored nation treatment has been eliminated allowing the Registry to license works to third parties without extending the same terms to Google.

This summary courtesy of the Publishers Lunch email report.

Related: Techmeme roundup.

Sure, he’ll lose market share, but he’ll make it up by catering to a clientele made up entirely of money-spending, hard-partying young people, plus a single undercover detective who infiltrates the shocking world of underground websites to track down a killer by having conversations in front of pole dancers. I assume.

I would say something about how silly Murdoch’s decision is, but after reading Sjoberg’s piece, I have literally nothing to add.

No great news, except that the Judge set November 9 as the date for the parties to submit the revised settlement agreement.

According to Ars, William Patry’s Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars is a powerful screed by a copyright lawyer with 27 years of experience who is currently Senior Copyright Counsel at Google. “Patry wants to show that copyright owners use metaphors—especially that of the ‘pirate’ and the ‘thief’—in order to short-circuit critical thinking on copyright issues.”

To borrow a term from the Free Software vs. Microsoft wars, the book accuses copyright owners of using a classic FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) strategy to have their way with Congress. (Though as Ars points out, Patry flings enough scary metaphors himself that he could be considered to use this strategy as well.)

I have not read the book myself, but from the review it sounds like it might be worth a look.

As for the Google OS netbook, it’s to include “HTML5 local caching for offline use.” Including with e-books?

If you’d rather read about Android and that OS’s impact on e-books, check out a Kindle Review post and an earlier TeleRead item.

Related: Different perspectives on netbook sales from SlashGear (upbeat) and China Daily (not so upbeat). Latter is the source of the photo.