june09c.indd


Jenni Terry W a s h i n g t o n  H o t l i n e  

Google Book Search settlement 
For a while now, the library world has been 
keeping a close eye on the proposed Google 
Book Search settlement. In recent weeks, 
the questions librarians and libraries have 
been raising over the last year are breaking 
into, and in many ways shaping, the national 
conversation about this project. 

As mentioned in last month’s Washington 
Hotline, ALA, ACRL, and the Association 
of Research Libraries (ARL) prepared a 
filing to submit to the U.S. District Court 
for the Southern District of New York in 
order to urge the judge to exercise vigor­
ous oversight in his ruling on the proposed 
settlement. 

Though the filing deadline was recently 
extended by the judge to September 4, 2009, 
following petitions to do so by a group of 
authors (including John Steinbeck’s heirs) 
and a group of academic authors repre­
sented by Professor Pamela Samuelson of 
Berkeley School of Law, the library associa­
tions moved forward with the plan to fi le 
before the original deadline, submitting 
their comments on May 4 to help inform the 
library community and the public as it con­
siders this important and complex matter. 

The concerns—including the absence 
of competition for new services and the 
settlement’s potential to affect fundamental 
library values including equity of access 
to information, patron privacy, and intel­
lectual freedom—are expanded upon in 
the fi ling. 

These key concerns shaped the library 
associations’ decision to urge the court 
to exercise vigorous oversight of the in­
terpretation and implementation of the 
settlement. 

While the groups believe that this pri­
vate settlement agreement has the potential 
to provide public access to millions of 

Jenni Terry is press officer at ALA’s Washington Offi  ce, 
e-mail: jterry@alawash.org 

books, the filing asserts that this settle­
ment has certain foreseeable problems 
that may require the court’s intervention 
in the future. 

In particular, the associations ask the 
court to ensure: 

• any library or institutional subscriber 
the ability to request the court to review 
the pricing of an institutional subscription; 

• anyone the ability to request the court 
to review the registry’s refusal to license 
copyrights to books on the same terms 
available to Google; 

• any class member the ability to re­
quest the court to review the procedures 
by which the registry selects members of its 
board of directors, and to evaluate whether 
the registry properly considers the interests 
of all class members in its decision­making; 

• any user the ability to request the 
court to direct Google to provide a list of 
books excluded from the database and an 
explanation of why; 

• any research the ability to request the 
court to review the reasonableness of the 
refusal to allow a researcher to conduct 
research at a host site; and, fi nally, 

• any user the ability to request the 
court to direct Google and the registry to 
disclose their policies for collecting, retain­
ing, disseminating, and protecting person­
ally identifi able information. 

Many of the libraries’ concerns have as 
much to do with what is not addressed, 
or omitted, from the settlement as with 
what is in it, and the library associations 
are hopeful that raising these concerns to 
the judge will ultimately grant libraries and 
the public some much­needed assurance 
that the interpretation and implementation 
of the settlement will ensure the broad­
est possible benefit from the services the 
settlement enables without sacrifi cing fun­
damental library principles. 

The filing and additional resources are 
available at wo.ala.org/gbs. 

366C&RL News June 2009

mailto:jterry@alawash.org