Opposition to Google Deal Mounts, as Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon Join Forces
"Open Book Alliance" will ally with Internet Archive, involve some library groups
Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 08/21/2009
- Some library groups are partners
- Not all authors' views represented by Authors Guild
- Has French national library joined Google?
(For a set of links, go to LibraryJournal.com/GoogleBookSearchSettlement.)
The Internet Archive and its subsidiary Open Content Alliance (OCA) are apparently forming a coalition to challenge the Google Book Search Settlement. As revealed today, industry giants Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon—all of which have reason to be concerned about Google’s dominance—have signaled their support for the coalition challenge.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Peter Brantley, a director at the Internet Archive said the full group will be officially announced in the next few weeks. Another leader, however, is Gary Reback, an antitrust lawyer who pushed for a federal antitrust investigation into Microsoft case in the 1990s. In comments to The New York Times The New York Times, Reback said that the Google deal was anticompetitive.
The Times also reported that the group is “tentatively called the Open Book Alliance.”
Seemingly confirming the group's designation, Brantley told LJ that the similarity to OCA's name is not entirely coincidental: "Both express a similar aim of opening up access to information—although this effort is focused on books in the context of the google book settlement proposal. [Open Book Alliance] is a name that the prospective members of the alliance are comfortable with."
Library groups join in
Brantley told the WSJ that the Special Libraries Association, the New York Library Association, and the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) will join the group. On the possibility of larger library organizations, such as the American Library Association, joining the coalition, Brantley told LJ:
We are in conversation with other library associations, and it is entirely likely that others may join us in the coming weeks; although there are many distinct interests among the many different kinds of libraries, we are all concerned about how we serve the primary aims of libraries—providing unfettered information access to the broadest possible public—and articulating that concern as a union has proven itself to be more effective than standing apart.As far as authors are concerned, the presence of the ASJA suggests they many not feel the Authors Guild, a plaintiff in the suit along with the Association of American Publishers, fully represents their interests. Recently, a group of academics also told the federal court that the Authors Guild didn’t reflect their concerns.
In the WSJ, Brantley said that the new coalition won’t issue a single, coordinated comment to the court, which will hold a hearing in early October, but all that all parties involved want some revisions.
French national library joins?
Quoting the French newspaper La Tribune, the Times of London stated that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France was on the verge of a deal to join Google Book Search, one that would point out the paucity of French efforts to have Europe go it alone, with an underfunded and technologically challenged European Union digital library, Europeana.
Google has not announced that the French library has become a partner. However, Philippe Colombet, Google’s Strategic Partnership Development Manager, Europe, wrote August 18 on the Inside Google Books blog about Sharing Public Domain Books; he stated, “So we're in constant dialog with several prestigious cultural institutions, such as the Spanish National Library and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, in order to help as many readers as possible around the world search and read public domain books.”
