It’s too bad that Peters’ talk has not been made more accessible, in particular, that a transcript has not been made available. There is a fairly brief summary of Peters’ talk and link to the video in an article by Anita Bartholomew. Bartholomew does a good job of reporting Peters’ main point, which is that the legislative branch (Congress) needs to be involved in the issues of the Settlement, instead of leaving it to the judiciary. She says the “class action” that’s used in the Settlement has normally only been used for settling past conflicts, not for issues that will continue to have wide implications in the future. For the most part, then, I will not try to give a complete summary of Peters’ talk on the video. But there is an interesting section at the beginning of her talk that is not recorded by Bartholomew that I think is important, in which Peters reports the history of Google’s communication with the Library of Congress about the Google library project. I’ll quote my transcription of Peters’ words on this:

“Google came to the Library of Congress and said we want to digitize all your books, and there was a lot interest on the part of the Library of Congress because you’d get a digital copy back. And then someone said, maybe we should ask Marybeth the copyright question, at which point I said, well, if they do public domain works it’s ok, but I’m very uncomfortable with systematically copying every book that’s in our collection … and I can’t see that as fair use so I have to tell you NO … The agreement was actually started at the Library of Congress, and the mission agreement was sort of from the Library of Congress.”

The most interesting thing in what Peters says here is that Google apparently approached LC about their book-scanning ideas before they talked to other partner libraries, presumably before the launch of Google Print in Dec 2004. How different the situation might be today if LC had taken Google up on the idea! Would Google be scanning books mainly at LC, instead of at a variety of other libraries?

On the video, Peters’ talk is the first one, following ca 7 min of introduction. Peters talks for ca 17 min, followed by ca 8 min of questions.