2011 Articles

Legislative Alternatives to the Google Book Settlement

Samuelson, Pamela

The audacity of the Google Book Search ("GBS") initiative, under which Google has scanned millions of in-copyright books from the collections of major research libraries in order to index their contents and serve up snippets in response to search queries, was surpassed only by the audacity of the proposed settlement of the class action lawsuit that challenged this scanning. Approval of the settlement would, among other things, have given Google the right to commercialize virtually every out-of-print book in the corpus (unless rights holders came forward to say no).