Indie publishing hero Richard Nash directs us to some interesting commentary by John Mark Ockerbloom at the terrific Everybody’s Libraries site:

“A lot of people have commented on Google’s monopoly here, but the settlement actually creates another monopoly, one that may be more problematic, and that’s the Book Rights Registry. The name suggests a passive store of information, but in fact it’s an active agent that has the power to negotiate and set terms of access on behalf of publishers and authors for millions of out of print books. This is the body—and the only body—that will set the default wholesale prices for copyrighted books, whether they’re provided by Google or by anyone else that might get similar rights in the future.”

“And the information the registry maintains might not be what’s most useful to libraries and the public. As agents for copyright holders, they’re likely to keep very good records about who claims rights to various books, and who you should pay if you want to use them. But they won’t have much incentive to determine, for instance, that a particular work is actually in the public domain. As we saw in yesterday’s first panel, many works published after 1922 actually are public domain, but it’s often very difficult for someone to find this out. And I’ve already heard some folks advise publishers to claim anything they might have rights to, if there’s any uncertainty about its status. So there needs to be some counterbalance to the claims made by commercial publishers and rightsholder organizations.”

“That’s why I wonder whether it might be a good idea to imagine a sort of “Reader’s Rights Registry”, that would serve as a counterbalance to the Book Rights Registry. The reader’s registry would track information and advocate on behalf of readers and libraries. For instance, it could compile facts related to public domain status or open content licenses, and share these facts widely with the community. It could press Google and other vendors to keep prices affordable, and to make it easy for readers to protect their privacy. It could track books withheld or withdrawn from full text access, for whatever reason, and work to provide access through alternative channels where appropriate. It could press Congress or the Justice Department for reasonable and nondiscriminatory blanket licensing of orphan works and out of print works.”

To which a posting at Inside Google Book Search by Jon Orwant, an Engineering Manager at GBS, could be seen as a reply: “we’re committed to making as many books available online to users as possible while respecting copyright, and this is one example of that commitment” –pointing to an effort to get as many of the US Copyright Office records as they can get digitized and online.