F is for Fiction: Law school's Public Index to $125m Google Book Search Settlement

With each passing week, New York Law School’s highly anticipated “The Public Index” to the proposed $125 million Google Book Search Settlement seems more and more like a solid piece of Information Age fiction. According to an increasingly humorous press release of May 5, 2009, announcing the launch of the school’s Public Interest Book Search Initiative:

Later this May, the Law School will introduce The Public Index, a Web site that will feature discussion forums, a comprehensive archive of settlement documents and related commentary, and a tool for users to insert their analysis and commentary on individual paragraphs of the proposed settlement.

“The Public Index will respond to the enormous public interest in the lawsuit by providing both high-quality information about the issues and a forum for the public to the make their own voices heard,” Professor Grimmelmann said.

The Public Index will feature an “open source amicus brief” -- a wiki that provides site users with the opportunity to edit and discuss a draft of the Institute’s brief to the court explaining the benefits and risks of the proposed settlement from a public-interest perspective.“This will be a legal brief of the people, by the people, and for the people,” Professor Grimmelmann said.

Professor James Grimmelmann is an expert on the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit and author of “How to Fix the Google Book Search Settlement.”

Hopefully, "D is for Digitize," a conference on the Google Book Search Lawsuit to be held at New York Law School, October 8 through October 10, 2009, is not fictitious.