Google lawsuit and UC project

It is good news that a proposed agreement has been submitted to the United States District Court to settle a lawsuit against the Google Book Search digitization project.

While the three major library partners (the University of California, the University of Michigan, and Stanford University) were not parties in the lawsuit, Google requested extensive input from us on issues of importance to library and university communities. For nearly two years, we strongly advocated for library interests including maximum public access to works in the public domain. Our efforts to preserve, maintain, and provide access to books played a critical role in achieving this agreement. While the settlement is not all we would have liked it to be, on balance the agreement is consistent with the libraries' mission and serves the public interest by providing the widest possible access to these materials.

The settlement agreement allows us to continue our participation in the Google Book Search project. The partner libraries and Google will review and update our original contracts to reflect the terms of the settlement.

I have attached a joint press release from the major library partners, and you can find more information from Google at http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/.

Gerry Munoff
University Librarian, University of California Irvine
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From Metafilter:
"The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search."
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Authors, publishers settle suit against Google
By HILLEL ITALIE - AP (Associated Press) October 28, 2008