Target Audience: Librarians who are interested in content digitization, as well as those interested in the status of the Google Book Settlement
Learning Outcomes: 1. Participants will be able to understand the background and current legal status of the Google Book Settlement. 2. Participants will explore strengths and weaknesses of Google's proposed private market solution to the problem of orphan works for books.
Through its book scanning project, Google has announced a lofty goal to someday "make the full text of all the world's books searchable by anyone." As if that weren't big enough, it wants to sell these books. In the process, Google has encountered legal problems and is involved in a protracted settlement that seeks to give it an affirmative grant of the copyrights necessary to start selling books. James Grimmelmann, a law professor from New York Law School, has tracked the Google project closely and regularly blogs about it. For this session, Grimmelmann will summarize the current legal status of the project, and will put the Google Book Settlement in context of the overall question of orphan works in the United States.