Google Inc.

Google Books Settlement

History/timeline of settlement

Advantage of Google Books for Google

Revenue

Advertising

Possibility of other Revenue sources

-Google

Hyde, Lewis. "Advantage Google." The New York Times. 1 Oct. 2009. Web. 20 Oct. 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/books/review/Hyde-t.html?_r=1>.

·         First-ever copyright act, the 1710 Statute of Anne.

·         gave writers ownership of their work

·         limited the term of ownership to 28 years

·         Judge Denny Chin of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York  will hold a hearing on proposed settlement of the lawsuit brought by authors and publishers against Google

·         Google made digital copies of millions of in-copyright books

·         settlement is currently being revised in the wake of objections raised by the Department of Justice and other parties

·         Orphan works are all of the books whose copyrights are still active but whose writers cannot be found

·         There are millions of orphan works out there

·         statutory damages for copyright infringement now stand between $750 and $150,000 per instance

·         Carnegie Mellon University tried to digitize a collection of out-of-print books, one of every five turned out to be orphaned

·         Cornell tried to post a collection of agricultural monographs online, half were orphans

·         United States Holocaust Museum owns millions of pages of archival documents that it can neither publish nor digitize.

·         Of more than seven million works scanned by Google so far, four to five million appear to be orphaned

·         Google will commercialize these works -- sell them, display them online with ads, charge libraries for their use, and more

·         A portion of the money earned will go to Google outright

·         The rest will go to a new Book Rights Registry, where it will regularly be set aside for five years waiting for absent owners to claim it

·          At the end of each five-year period, all unclaimed funds will be distributed to the authors and publishers whose works the registry represents.

·         third parties would profit from orphan books through the Google settlement; authors would not profit

·         Department of Justice in fact suggested, when it issued a critique of the proposed settlement saying, among other things, that the court might do as we do with actual orphans: appoint a guardian to look out for them until they come of age.

·         By insisting that copyright exist only for "limited times" (as the Constitution says), they suggested a way that law itself might engender virtue, transforming the fruits of human imagination from private into common wealth by the mere passage of time

·         Google case is a class-action lawsuit structured such that it will bind all rights holders unless they opted out by a deadline

·         The missing owners of orphan works could not do that, of course; by definition they don't even know this litigation concerns them

·         That does free the orphans from copyright limbo, but here's the catch: They will effectively belong only to Google and the other settling parties

·         It will be almost impossible for any other online player to get the same right to use them

·         The only way a potential competitor could avoid the threat of statutory damages would be to do what Google did: scan lots of books, attract plaintiffs willing to form a class with an "opt out" feature, negotiate a settlement and get it approved by a judge. Even for those with time and money to spare, that promises to be an insurmountable barrier to entry

Stross, Randall. Planet Google. New York: Free, 2008. Print.

·         No preview available-listed references from web pages, online reviews, references from scholarly works, list of references from books found in the index

·         Full preview- books in the public domain

·         Limited view- books under copyright for which Google has secured permission to show a limited number of pages in it Book Partners Program

·         Snippet view- books under copyright for which Google has not secured permission to display pages

·         Can give supplementary information without infringing on copyright holders

·         Two lawsuits filed by publishers and by the authors guild

·         Challenges included mechanical engineering (designing imaging equipment), diplomacy (obtaining the cooperation of the largest repositories of books, university libraries), logistics (hauling books to scanning centers and back, without mishap), and legal expertise (ensuring that the effort did not run afoul of copyright law)

·         Required a financial commitment unlike anything the company had made before

·         Google set out to scan every single book (32 million) listed on WorldCat, the union catalog encompassing twenty-five thousand libraries around the world

·         Digitization of all books had been a dream of many. It was widely considered too ambitious to be attainable in the short term.

·         Google set a ten year timetable to achieve its goal.

·         Google will not divulge any details about how it captures the images of book pages

·         Google executives did not view the book digitization as an eleemosynary project; they were not contemplating donating funds to nonprofit organizations, like the University of Michigan, that had already begun digitizing books. Instead they were looking at the feasibility of Google performing all of the digitization itself, and then using the companies for its own purposes

·         Even if the Google Book Search did not produce immediate profits, the project would be expected, at some point, to yield a return to Google that was proportionate to the outsized investment that the company would have to make to pursue the project

·         Google had no close competition willing to match its spending on book search

·         Google had the chance to jump ahead not only because of its fiscal boldness but also because others who had tried to digitize the world's books had not gotten very far

"Corporate Information - Company Overview." Google. Web. 09 Nov. 2009.

                <http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html>.

"Home (Increasing Access to Books: The Google Books Settlement)." Google Sites - Free websites and

wikis. Web. 20 Oct. 2009.<http://sites.google.com/a/pressatgoogle.com/googlebooks

settlement/home>.

Comment-Title: Specify the aspect of the google book project that i'm focusing on.

The title I had was kind of vauge...I feel that a new title could be:

"The Limiting and Expanding Access to Information Due to the Google Books Project"

Comment-Family of Relevant Concerns: Specify the specific topic that will be focused on.

The topic will be focusing possibly on the access to information and in parts the economic effect on these specific groups and situations

Comment- Is it one group against another?

The paper will be set up so it show the reasons a group would be for and against both through  information and economics of each group, it won't pit one group against another

Thread to be kept throughout the paper: the reasons for and against due to limited or expanded access to information and economical effects of each specific group

The Scandalous and Splendid Aspects Surrounding Google Books

Research Question: In respect to Google Books, who are the doors of advantage opening and closing for?

Introduction

Introduction of Google Inc.

Founders story

How Google makes its profits

Advertising

Freemium

Introduction to Google Books

Google services

Basic Information about Google Books

Thesis statement

"Who are the doors of advantage opening and closing for?"

Will you reap the rewards?

Google Inc.

Google Books Settlement

History/timeline of settlement

Advantage of Google Books for Google

Revenue

Advertising

Possibility of other Revenue sources

Companies who oppose Google Books

History of Digitizing Books

Previous attempts

The Advantage Google has over others to digitize books

Why other companies oppose

Impact of Google Books Financially

Will Google corner the market

Who has banned together

Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon

People who develop and distribute books

Authors

Reasons for

Reasons against

Publishers

Reasons for

Reasons against

Librarians

Reasons for

Reasons against

Illustrators

Reasons for

Reasons against

People who read, buy, and borrow books

Scholars

Benefits

Disadvantages

Those who read for entertainment/enjoyment

Benefits

Disadvantages

Conclusion of what was found

Summarization of Pros/Cons

Google

Opposing Companies

Developers and Distributers

Readers, Buyers, and Borrowers

Concluding Statement

 

Fieldwork / Primary Research

1. Interview - professor, librarian, student, writers

-interview people who might have a personal and professional insite to my topic to try and get a more defined idea of where each party is coming from

2.  Survey - Student Survey from IUP

-may be able to see what students as a whole think of the concept of Google Books.

-will have to create a survey so that I would be able to make a generalization about a specific topic about Google Books

·  What should we do and how will others decisions effect us

• Online websites have been using the Freemium buisness model to make multi-billion dollar profits.
• Google is one of the leading online websites (companies) utilizing this evergrowing internet buisness model.
• Google has created and given away free services such as search, communication, etc.
• However are there some areas in which it is not benifical for google to give these services away for free.
• Google Books is now making it possible to see millions of books for free, however due to this free service what doors are being opened/closed and for whom.
• Analyzing the different groups involved such as: Librarians, Google, Users, Publishers, Writers... dynamics of each the other.....open and closed doors for each.
• The answer will show if this is a benificial free online service
• What should we do and how will others decisions effect us

1. What approaches to the conversations I have chosen will allow me to expose readers to an unfamiliar or overlooked dimension of my digital topic? I believe that the very topic is something that we now take for grantit, online books. However, there are those who believe that this was not such a good idea and bringing that into the light as well is also overlooked.

2. What approaches to the conversations I have chosen will allow me to act as an interpreter or inquirer? I believe that I will be able to show the viewpoint of the libraian, writer, publisher, person able to read the book now online, google proponant, etc.

3. How can one could tap into these conversations? (Is it represented in journals, in the media? Will it require interviews, observation, a survey?) I know that it is repesented in journals and in discussions online. I also believe however that I could survey individuals on their personal beliefs, as well as interview librarians on their opinions.

4. Complete these questions:

Who: librians, writers, publishers, users, google
What: Digitize books for online use through google, are the pros and cons
Why: does this have to be done (pros and cons)
When: did this take place, what happened, what will happen
Where: Online
Could: this have negative or positive effects
Would: this have negative or positive effects
Should: we be doing this?

4. Based on the list above, choose or revise a single question that seems most promising:
(A promising question is specific and researchable; it should require an extended answer; it should be a 'real' question in the sense that you and your readers will care about the answer.This is still a working question, so you can change or revise it later!)

What are the pros and cons of digitizing books online and do the benefits outway the negatives?

I would like to keep my topic from my mini-essay; the whole concept of free products/services and "hidden costs". Possibly add a history of business and free give a ways.

-How companies give services/products away for free (history, examples, why, how, is this concept of selling nothing but gaining profit good or bad for the economy?)

-falling costs of technology (why, examples)

-Three party systems (Consumers, producers, others)

-New idea of scarcity (reputation, only so much people will look at)

-Free business models ("freemium", advertising, cross-subsidies)

-Marketing companies using online personal data (how, why, personal gains, personal drawback, what can be done with the information, how does this change the business world-how things work, how they are run, ethics)

-We don't know we are being tracked (when, how, populations targeted)

-No restrictions (who would be in charge of setting restrictions, what kinds of restrictions could be made)

-Trade-off (free services for personal information, pros/cons, what does it mean for the future of business)

In my mini essay many of these were just touched on very briefly and not elaborated very much. In addition I believe that I may also be able to pull in more of today's company example, past examples, more sources, and even possibly collect some numbers of my own from IUP.

In the article by David Parry titled "Wikipedia and the New Curriculum", he talks about how some educational institutions prohibit the use of Wikipedia in their student's research. Parry continues to say, "Students and teachers alike must understand how systems of knowledge creation and archivization are changing", and I agree. With all the kinds' technologies changing everyday, it is important for everyone to understand how to utilize them.

I think that Wikipedia should be used as a tool by students and that the teachers have a responsibility to show them what information is out there and how to use it properly. In the article it talks about how students can read the history and discussion pages from each topic to help them. I was unaware that you could do that and found it very interesting. I think that a student could get a real feel for what the important issues are in their topic by looking at those pages. They will also be able to see how opinions and ideas have changed over the years.

In the same respect I don't believe that Wikipedia should be cited as a reference; yet that it should be a good place to have students start in order to gain an understanding of their topic. The only reason I wouldn't allow my students to cite it as a reference would be because others have such a negative opinion on it. I would hate to see a student of mine spend all his/her time on a paper and it wasn't taken seriously because they used Wikipedia as a source.

Overall I think it shows we, as educators, need to catch up with these fast paced technological times in order to benefit our students. Ignoring the fact that technology is out there is just plain dumb. The world is changing so fast and we have to give our students the best opportunity they can have; and these opportunity lies in being able to use and manipulate technology.