Conference on Google Book Settlement

NYU Law School is hosting a conference on the Google Book Settlement in two weeks. I am on a panel of publishing industry people and will be discussing my estimate of the Orphans population. Here are details (D is for Digitize):

Everything about the Google Book Search project is larger than life, from Google's audacious plan to digitize every book ever published to the gigantic class action settlement now awaiting court approval. The groundbreaking proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case is so complex that controversy has outpaced conversation and questions have outnumbered answers.

We aim to help close these gaps.

D Is For Digitize will give this complex lawsuit the sustained attention it deserves. An interdisciplinary lineup of academics and practitioners will examine the settlement through the lenses of copyright, civil procedure, antitrust, information policy, literary culture, and the publishing industry.

The conference is timed to coincide with the rescheduled fairness hearing in the Google Book Search case, which will be held on Wednesday, October 7 in New York City, just five blocks from the Law School. The next few days after the hearing (October 8th - October 10th) are to provide a forum for addressing the numerous issues that have emerged and are most relevant to society at large.

The conference schedule and speaker list have been posted, and will continue to be updated. For more information about the settlement, visit thepublicindex.org, our site to study and discuss the proposed Google Book Search settlement. There you can browse and annotate the proposed settlement, section-by-section.

Registration