Book People Archive

More About Google's Deal with U of Cal


DETAILS SURFACE ABOUT UC DEAL WITH GOOGLE

[This reports seems to have been "sanitized" compared to earlier
such reports that made it sound as if the entire contract between
Google and whole University of California system had been leaked.
In addition, it seems to not quite state flatly that if the deal
requires UC to ONLY provide EXCLUSIVE copies to Google, then the
deal they made with Yahoo's Brewster Kahle would be void. . .and
what would the legal implicaions be?]

Details of the recent deal in which the University of California will
join Google's book-scanning project have been released through an
open-records request. Under the deal, the university will provide as
many as 3,000 books per day to the search engine for digitization,
eventually totaling at least 2.5 million books. The university and
Google will keep copies of the digitized works, but the university is
bound by a number of restrictions on how it can use its copies. For
example, the university must prevent other search engines from scanning
the books. Critics of the project, including Brewster Kahle, cofounder
of the Internet Archive, said Google is getting more than it should
from the arrangement. He faulted the university for "spend[ing]
millions of taxpayers' dollars to benefit a single corporation's
interest in building a private library." Daniel Greenstein, director of
the California Digital Library and one of the brokers of the deal, said
that Google's business model and its interests align well with the
university's goal of providing free "public access for the public domain."
Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 August 2006
http://chronicle.com/free/2006/08/2006082501t.htm


From Edupage and tomorrow's Project Gutenberg Newsletter, PT1