February 25, 2011
Private: Legal Fight Over Google Book Project Not Resolved, Still Troubling, Privacy Advocate Says
EPIC, Google, Google Books, James Grimmelmann, Marc Rotenberg, online privacy
Google's massive effort to create a digital database of books is still tangled in a class action lawsuit, and as Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) tells Politico Pro, a subscriber-based service, was "entirely based on giving Google control over many of the nation's historic library resources and then be a gatekeeper for who could get access to those materials."
In his interview with Politico Pro, Rotenberg expounded on the legal battle over the Google books project, adding that it was "taking materials that were freely available and now seeking to charge for them. And also was hoping to collect a great deal of information from people wanting to get access to the materials."
In an ACS Issue Brief, James Grimmelmann, a law professor at New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, outlined similar concerns, writing that "Google has been systematically making digital copies of books in the collections of many major university libraries. It made the digital copies searchable through its web site - you couldn't read the books, but you could at least find out where the phrase you're for appears within them. This outraged copyright owners, who filed a class action lawsuit to make Google stop." The settlement of the class action has not been resolved, but in his Issue Brief Grimmelmann asserted that the settlement "would give Google a license not only to scan books, but also to sell them."
Rotenberg also told Politico Pro that he believes "Google is posing the greatest privacy challenges to the future of the Internet. The reason for that is simple: Google exercises a dominant position over most of the essential Internet services. That includes search, e-mail, advertising, online video and increasingly the Web browser. Each one of those activities involves intensive data collection. The risk associated with Google's dominance of the Internet leads very directly to growing concerns about the privacy."