More on Google Books Project

Click here for an entertaining blog entry at the Fiction Circus from Miracle Jones who interviews Prof. Grimmelman at New York Law about the Google Books Project. The interview covers wide ranging issues including orphan books & a proposed rights auction (proposed by Fiction Circus, that is). Read it and see!

During the course of the interview, we also discovered several other troubling facts that makes an auction seem absolutely necessary: Google will have the right to manage the content of its scans in the same way that it manages YouTube videos, deleting content that it deems "inappropriate" without any clear editorial guidelines. Since no one else has the right to put this literature up without being sued, the literature that Google deems "inappropriate" will effectively be banned from the internet for decades until it becomes public domain.

Miracle also notes that Brewster Kahle's petition that the Internet Archive be included in the settlement has been denied. There are several other interesting notes with helpful links, and a transcript of the interview with Prof. Grimmelman. For a site with such a circus look, it actually has very serious content, along with some very entertaining illustrations.