E-Publishing / Legal Issues

Cairns, Michael. A Database of Riches: Measuring the Options for Google's Book Settlement (22 April 2010)(http://www.scribd.com/full/30334705?access_key=key-23rh5w2lwcdmcmzph2k4 ) – Everybody has been waiting patiently to see if Judge Chin will accept the proposed amended settlement of the lawsuit brought by authors and publishers against Google, but with his recent confirmation to the Court of Appeals, it is unclear if Judge Chin will decide himself or turn the whole mess over to a new judge. In the interim, we have to continue to make educated guesses about what the Google database, if it is approved, will look like. In this new report, Michael Cairns, a former president of R.R. Bowker and a publishing consultant, who earlier tried to calculate the number of orphan works in the Google database, turns his attention to the business model for the institutional subscription. It is the first public analysis that tries to estimate how much a yearly subscription might cost. One can question his assumptions about likely subscription prices or whether the market penetration he anticipates would meet the settlement's requirement for wide acceptance of the product, but I was struck by his calculation of how relatively low subscription prices for the database of out-of-print books would generate huge windfall profits for the rights holders. He estimates $260 million in total revenues per year, 70% of which, or $182 million, would go to the rights owners. It suggests that a low subscription/high market penetration business model, rather than the high subscription/limited sales model normally adopted when marketing to libraries, would generate the greatest revenues. - PH*

Anderson, Ivy. Model Language for Author Rights in Library Content Licenses Research Library Issues (269)(April 2010)(http://publications.arl.org/pageview/rli/s68n7/12). – University authors are a bit like people who accept software click-through licenses: they blithely sign their publishing agreements, assuming that they retain all the rights they want, and don't bother reading the fine detail to see if they have actually signed away their immortal souls. Librarians know better, and so have been at the forefront of initiatives that encourage authors to amend their publication contracts and adopt campus-wide open-access mandates that automatically preserve some important rights for authors. An ARL ad hoc working group is at work on a third, very promising approach. Since libraries already negotiate with publishers licenses for content (licenses that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars), why not require as part of that content license that institutional authors retain needed rights, regardless of what their publication agreement might say? This article presents the group's draft model license that does just that. It is a clever way of exerting libraries' market power, and if widely adopted, could have an even greater transformative impact than the so-called "green open access" campaign. Comment on the draft now, and start thinking about how to include it in future content license negotiations. - PH*