1. LIBER and the Google Book
Settlement
Wouter Schallier
Executive Director

2. About LIBER
 www.libereurope.eu
 The largest network of European research
libraries: almost 400 institutions, from over 40
countries
 Mission: to represent and promote the
interests of European research libraries, and
of their users: students and researchers

3. Google Book Settlement
 Would end the copyright infringement lawsuit
brought against G. in 2005
 G. would continue scanning in-copyright
books, Publishers and authors would agree
not to sue
 G. will earn money through advertising and
through selling access to full text in copyright
not commercially available books
 Books Right Registry: G. 37%,
publishers/authors 63% of revenues

4. The digital information landscape
 Research and education are the pillars of the
European knowledge economy
 The Google Book Search programme has the
potential to provide public access to a digital
library of millions of books
 This could be an unprecedented source for
the advancement of research, learning and
human development

5. The digital information landscape (2)
 Research libraries have been struggling to
get funding for digitisation projects
 Important initiatives, like Europeana, have
been taken but a lot of work remains…
 So we wellcome all efforts to digitise
information resources and to make them
publicly available

6. BUT

7. Territorial limits
 Serious competitive disadvantage for
Europe
 The proposed settlement only applies in the
USA
 Users outside the USA will only have access
to 3 snippets of text
 Example: a book written by a French author,
published in USA, can be digitised by G., but
will not be accessible to the author nor to his
colleagues

8. Risk of abuse of dominant position
 Size of project: 30 million books, $750 million
 Large proportion of the world’s heritage of
books in digital format will be under control of
a single corporate entity
 No exclusivity, but Google has a 5 year lead

9. No free access for R&E
 Public and research libraries, upon request,
will be able to give free public access on one
terminal per building
 This limitation goes against what the
researcher/learner expects in terms of access
to information: from their PC over the network

10. No criteria for non-consumptive research
 DB containing digitised books: unique corpus
for computational analysis and research
 Settlement: “2 institutions may host this
corpus of the purposes of non-consumptive
research by qualified user”
 What are the criteria?
 No mechanism for non-American
researchers

11. No long-term preservation strategy
 Google forever?
 No provisions for the long-term preservation
of the entire DB
 How can libraries play their role of trusted
curators of scholarly information?

12. No unified copyright regime in EU
 The G. Books Settlement precludes the
needs and the interests of the European user
 Plethora of national legislation in Europe
concerning copyright makes it difficult to
adopt a Settlement in EU

13. Risk of censorship
 G. may exclude 15% of scanned books from
the DB!
 G. is likely to come under pressure from
interest groups and governments to exclude
books that contain “undesirable” information

14. Privacy
 Some of the services to be offered imply that
G. will collect and retain information of users’
activities
 Settlement does not specify how users’
privacy will be protected

15. Risk of diminishing users’ rights
 Contracts, like the Google Book Settlement,
too often override statutory exceptions and
limitations in ways that diminish user’s rights

16. Thank you! Questions?
Wouter SCHALLIER
LIBER Executive Director
M: +31 6 29 04 79 52
E: wouter.schallier@kb.nl
W: www.libereurope.eu