I met recently with Cory Doctorow to talk [stay tuned for audio] about his latest book Little Brother [free download here], and the future of the book. During our conversation Cory mentioned that he was signatory to a call, led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for rejection, or amendment at least, of a proposed settlement in a lawsuit over Google’s Book Search service. Here’s the conclusion to what Cory and the ‘Privacy Authors and Publishers’ had to say to the judge:

"Courts, libraries, and legislatures have fiercely protected the right to read without fear of being watched or reported upon. The Settlement, if approved, may enable Google Book Search to become the world’s largest public library, institutional library, book “purchasing” and ongoing access system combined. It is no understatement to say that this Settlement may create the central way that books are accessed in the future, and the only way to access certain books. Because of its potential to greatly expand book access, Google Book Search is extremely exciting.

Yet that future potential will be undermined if this Court allows Google to collect intimate, invasive and previously unavailable information on readers, aggregate that that sensitive information with information about them collected by and through other Google products, and by doing so create a real risk of disclosure of that sensitive information to prying governmental entities and private litigants. This chilling effect will hurt all authors and publishers, but especially those who write about sensitive or controversial topics. It will also hurt the public interest, as the advance of digitization would come at the cost of reader privacy. The Privacy Authors and Publishers were not adequately represented in the settlement negotiations. They would not have agreed to a Settlement so bereft of privacy protections. Without additional protections, the Settlement is not fair, reasonable or adequate to the class members or to the public. It should not be approved until sufficient privacy protections are put into place."

I’m meeting with lawyer (and Google senior copyright counsel) Bill Patry  this afternoon to discuss his new book Moral Panic and the Copyright Wars…I’ll be talking to him in his capacity not as an employee of Google, but as a citizen concerned about how the copyright debate is being conducted. Topics of conversation: the public good versus private gain, menacing metaphors, and the sanctity of privacy. Let me know if you have any pressing concerns about these issues, and I’ll try to thread them into the questioning.

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Related posts:

1. Book Search: Google versus MSN: Thiru Anandanpillai Audio Interview with Nigel Beale.
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3. Audio Interview with Keith Michael Fiels, Executive Director of the American Library Association: Actions Librarians can take to Improve their Libraries
4. Awesome Authors from Rockcliffe Park Public School
5. Anish Kapoor puts you in Awe

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 8:05 AM and is filed under Future of the Book. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.