UC AcademicsRaise Major Concerns About Google Settlement

Pricing, privacy are at issue; Google has responded to open access

Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 08/20/2009

• 21 faculty leaders
• Academic authors have different priorities
• Letter likely reflects views of faculty members nationally
• Potential solutions to price gouging

(For a set of links, go to LibraryJournal.com/GoogleBookSearchSettlement.)

Offering a crucial little-heard voice in the debate over the Google Book Search Settlement, 21 leading University of California faculty members have written a letter to the court asking for supplementary provisions to address their concerns. In the letter, the scholars speak on behalf of academic authors more interested in the public interest than in supporting themselves from their book revenues.

“We are concerned that the [plaintiff] Authors Guild negotiators likely prioritized maximizing profits over maximizing public access to knowledge, while academic authors would have reversed those priorities,” the faculty members wrote. “We note that the scholarly books written by academic authors constitute a much more substantial part of the Book Search corpus than the Authors Guild members’ books.”

Their concerns also reflect those expressed by library leaders and civil liberties groups, notably pricing for academic institutions and privacy. The signatories include the entire membership of the Academic Council, the executive body of the Academic Senate, and the chair of the Senate’s Committee on Libraries and Scholarly Communications.

They wrote in their personal rather than official capacities but said they believe faculty colleagues on other campuses share their unease. The also expressed dismay that the confidentiality rules governing the negotiations—which some UC officials and librarians did participate in—precluded the opportunity for the faculty members to weigh in. A hearing on the settlement is scheduled for early October.

[Also see (corrected) Peter Hirtle's concerns about use fees for printing and a report in Publishers Weekly about an author and attorney filing an objection that claims the sweeping deal is an illegal expansion of class-action law.]

Three concerns

They wrote:

We have three main concerns about the proposed settlement agreement. First, to maximize access to knowledge, prices should be reasonable. Unfortunately, the proposed settlement agreement contains inadequate checks and balances to prevent price gouging and unduly restrictive terms for purchasers of books and institutional subscribers.

Second, the agreement does not contemplate or make provision for open access choices that have in recent years become common among academic authorial communities, especially with regard to out of print books. The settlement agreement only contemplates that authors would monetize their books and related metadata through the Book Rights Registry (BRR). This is especially worrisome as to the millions of out of print, and likely orphan, books.

Third, the agreement contemplates some monitoring of user queries and uses of books in the Book Search corpus that negatively impinge on significant privacy interests of authors and readers and undermine fundamental academic freedom principles.”

Resolving open access
Shortly after the letter was sent on August 13, Google, responding to previously-raised concerns about open access, did in fact agree to allow a Creative Commons license, a move that Google critic James Grimmelmann praised on his Laboratorium blog.

The risks of price gouging
While the faculty members said they believed that Google would make institutional subscriptions available to universities for reasonable prices and terms at first, “[w]e are deeply concerned, however, that prices of institutional subscriptions will rise substantially and unjustifiably over time and that terms of access and use will become more restrictive as the user base expands, generating network effects that will create significant ‘lock-in’ problems arising from the existence of two complementary monopolies, the Google Book Search service and the BRR, that will be created upon approval of the settlement.”

The example they provided—as have library deans—is that of scholarly journals, where commercial publishers with near-monopolies “have been able to raise subscription prices for many journals to astronomical levels.”

They pointed out that, despite the settlement agreement’s nod to “pricing of similar products and services available from third parties,” there is no comparable product, and none is possible unless orphan works legislation passes.

Solutions on pricing
They proposed several potential solutions to guard against “the grave risks of future price gouging and other unreasonable terms”:

• The court could retain jurisdiction over the case and appoint a special master to hear complaints
• The existing arbitration of disputes provision could be extended to institutional subscribers
• The agreement could be modified to ensure “more robust competition”
• Academic authors could be required to be represented on the BRR governing body
• A new way could be devised to reset prices
• The agreement could be amended so that “unclaimed” funds from public domain and orphan books and books whose owners have not registered with BRR would be used to reduce institutional subscription prices rather than got to BRR registrants and literacy causes

Privacy
Google has said it’s committed to privacy, but that such concerns were not part of the settlement. In the letter, the faculty members warn that the proposed settlement agreement “contains some provisions that call for monitoring book usage in ways that do not respect user privacy,” including reporting requirements regarding use of "library digital copies.”

“The potential risks to user privacy in digital networked environments are thus far greater than in traditional library contexts,” the faculty members wrote, noting that, while “Google has made commitments to protect consumer privacy in other contexts (e.g., as to health information),” it has not yet done so regarding the Book Search. 

“The settlement agreement does not contain any description of what, if any, protections there will be as to data about user queries and other Book Search-related activities if third parties request that Google turn over information about the user’s queries to them,” the letter states. “Google should be required to give notice to users about requests for disclosure of such information and to provide the users with an opportunity to object to the disclosure as an unwarranted invasion of his/her privacy.”

Read more Newswire stories:

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