-Library Journal, October 1, 2009 by Francine Fialkoff
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6698035.html

The more experts like Peters and Samuelson delve into the settlement, the more they uncover troubling implications. It is clearly not in the best interest of libraries or the various publics they serve.

-The New York Times, October 7, 2009 by Motoko Rich
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/technology/internet/08google.html?_r=2

Pamela Samuelson, an Internet and copyright expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who has led a group of scholars objecting to the settlement, said she also had doubts about the timeline. “It’s hard to believe that so much could change that it would respond to all serious objections,” Ms. Samuelson wrote in an e-mail message.

-The Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2009 by Jessica E. Vascellaro
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703298004574459042709660608.html#printMode

Pamela Samuelson, an intellectual property professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said she invited around two dozen people in February to a private conference to study the settlement in secret. Instead of inviting Google, she invited class-action lawyers and others to provide “tutorials” on various aspects of the 141-page legal document, she said.

The Huffington Post, September 24, 2009 by Pamela Samuelson
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-samuelson/google-book-settlement-10_b_296343.html

The GBS deal can’t be fixed by tweaking a few details. Reading through even a sampling of the hundreds of objections to the proposed settlement, one sees an amazingly diverse configuration of opponents and a vast array of problems that cannot be remedied by minor fixes.

-National Public Radio, September 2, 2009 by Laura Sydell
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112484311

“[The Authors Guild doesn’t] share the academic values that I think would lead people like me to prefer and want to maximize public access rather than maximize revenues,” she says. Though Google says authors can opt out of making people pay to see their work, Samuelson remains skeptical because some of the fine print in the agreement could be construed differently.

-KQED FM, September 8, 2009 Host Michael Krasny
http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R909080900

“The problem is not that Google Books doesn’t offer us some very valuable access to public domain books right now and to books whose right’s holders have agreed to it. My letter doesn’t ask the judge to deny or reject the settlement altogether, but to say, ‘there are still some things that need to be dealt with.’ And so I’m asking him to condition his approval of the settlement.”

-Library Journal, September 10, 2009 by Norman Oder and Josh Hadro
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6695942.html

“Academic authors would, we believe, have insisted on much different terms than the Authors Guild did, especially in respect of pricing of institutional subscriptions, open access, annotation sharing, privacy, and library user rights to print out pages from out-of-print books,” Samuelson wrote.

-Berkeleyan, September 10, 2009 by Carol Ness
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2009/09/10_google-books.shtml

Samuelson has written that the settlement would amount to “a privately negotiated compulsory license designed to monetize millions of orphan works” for the benefit of Google, plus some—but not all—authors and publishers.

NPR, ″all tech considered″ blog, August 25, 2009 by Laura Sydell
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2009/08/uc_berkeley_law_scholar_tells.html

“A lot of academic authors never really wrote those books for the money in the first place,” says Samuelson. She says what many scholars want is for their ideas to reach a large number of people. If the current settlement is approved, Samuelson says people will have to pay for access to digitized versions of work by scholars who feel it’s more important for people to see their work and share their ideas than it is for them to make a few extra pennies.

San Francisco Chronicle, August 19, 2009 by James Temple
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/19/BUQH199RJU.DTL&type=printable

Some legal experts believe the growing confusion will create more opposition to the deal, which could factor into the settlement hearing and potentially limit the scope of the books program. But Pamela Samuelson, co-director of the UC Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, said it’s more likely to lead to a sort of collective paralysis that prevents affected parties from taking any action.

-The Huffington Post, August 10, 2009 by Pamela Samuelson
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-samuelson/the-audacity-of-the-googl_b_255490.html

Why did Google decide to settle instead of to fight? Inspired perhaps by Rahm Emanuel, who has observed “you never want a serious crisis go to waste,” Google recognized that AAP and the Guild would be willing to settle their lawsuits by vastly expanding the plaintiff class to all persons with a U.S. copyright interest in one or more books. The settlement could then give Google a license to commercialize all books owned by the class.

-Library Journal, August 11, 2009 by Norman Oder
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6675916.html

Samuelson contends that Google, which had a good case that its scanning was fair use, chose to settle with the plaintiffs, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Authors Guild (AG), because it could then get access to the universe of books. And the APP and AG would be willing to settle because they’d get a privileged position as representatives of the larger classes.

-PC World, July 2, 2009 by Nancy Gohring
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/167830/doj_officially_opens_investigation_into_google_book_search.html

Pamela Samuelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, argues that the proposed settlement is in essence a way to monetize so-called orphan works, and that it is questionable whether the deal represents the best interests of the authors of such works. Orphan works are those for which no one claims ownership, because either the author is dead or the publishing house no longer exists.

-Internet Search Engine Database, July 5, 2009 by Kaila Krayewski
http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/2090/1/Google-Book-Search-Settlement-Inquiry-Announced/Page1.html

Samuelson asserts that the settlement would give Google a monopoly over the biggest digital collection of books in the world. The settlement would also allow Google to sell orphan books and subscriptions to them—making it the first company ever with such a right. Another major problem with the settlement is that unless copyright owners opt out of the settlement, they are effectively opting in.

PC World, June 10, 2009 by Juan Carlos Perez
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/166417/reports_doj_turns_up_the_heat_on_googles_book_deal.html

“The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry’s future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is,” Samuelson wrote.