For immediate release:
April 1, 2011
For more information, contact:
Jonathan Band
policybandwidth
202-296-5675
jband@policybandwidth.com
Washington DC—The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) – comprised of the Association for Research Libraries (ARL), the American Library Association (ALA), and the Association for College & Research Libraries (ACRL) – announces the release of “A Guide for the Perplexed Part IV: The Rejection of the Google Books Settlement,” an analysis of the latest decision in the Google Books Search case and its potential effect on libraries.
This guide is the latest in a series prepared by LCA legal counsel Jonathan Band to help inform the library community about this landmark legal dispute.
In the Guide Part IV, Band explains why the Court rejected the proposed class action settlement, which would have allowed Google to engage in a wide variety of activities using scanned books.
As stated in the Guide, “The court concluded that the settlement was unfair because a substantial number of class members [i.e., authors and publishers] voiced significant concerns with the settlement.… However, the validity of the objections seemed less important to the court than the fact that many class members raised them.”
As for the impact of the decision on libraries, Band writes that while it is too early to say what the parties will do next, “it appears that both the challenges and the opportunities presented to libraries by the settlement when it was announced in the fall of 2008 are growing narrower and more distant.”
The full text of the Guide is available at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/guideiv-final-1.pdf. Past Guides and other LCA materials related to the case are available at http://www.arl.org/pp/ppcopyright/google/index.shtml.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 126 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at http://www.arl.org/.