One of the primary opponents of the Google Books settlement said yesterday that the revised settlement submitted Friday hadn't alleviated her concerns and that she would continue to urge the judge to reject the agreement.

The University of California, Berkeley's, Pamela Samuelson, a law professor and director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, was one of the key figures raising concerns about the settlement in the academic community. One of the primary issues of contention, expressed in a letter opposing the original settlement and submitted to Judge Denny Chin on September 3, is that, in selling subscriptions to universities to access the collection of books Google had scanned, Samuelson and her colleagues believe "the public good of the traditional library" would be transformed into "a commercial enterprise" controlled by a "monopoly."

Yesterday, during a panel at the Commonwealth Club on the future of books, Samuelson said the revisions submitted by Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers hadn't addressed her concerns.

The issues that I raised in a letter that I submitted to the judge on behalf of 65 academic authors in September were numerous....

One of them had to do with some meaningful constraints on pricing of institutional subscriptions. Most of us in the academic communities are quite aware that Reed Elsevier and other journal publishers have just engaged outrageously large price hikes over the last couple of years and really made it very difficult for any other independent journals to really be able to sell.... I don't think that Google Books will charge excessive prices in the first three or five years, but what I see is that the chance is very high that there will be price gouging over time.

I also raise questions about user privacy. There are dozens of provisions in the settlement agreement that call for monitoring of what users do with books and essentially no privacy protections built into the settlement agreement.

While I think that there were some substantial changes that were made to it, it more had to do with getting foreign rights holders out of the settlement and trying to respond at least in part to issues that the Department of Justice raised. So I think there are dozens and dozens of issues that were raised by objectors to the settlement agreement that are, in fact, not addressed in this revision.

So, from my standpoint, all of the reasons I had to be concerned about the settlement agreement back in September still apply, and I'm going to be urging the judge not to endorse the settlement in its current state.

The response of Google Books engineering director Dan Clancy, after the jump.

Clancy was also on the panel. He reiterated positions Google has taken previously on these issues: that price protections are built into the agreement and that privacy issues will be dealt with as Google builds out the Books service.

Pam, often when she talks about prices, she sometimes says, "I'm not worried that Dan's going to raise prices real high, but what happens when Dan leaves, and there's other folks there?"

I agree with the question. We spent a lot of time in the development of the settlement trying to find a balance that worked for the various parties that had what I think are protections. Pam doesn't think they're enough, which I respect... She talks about the Elsevier concerns, which we probably spent six months trying to think about.

I personally think, even when I'm long gone, that there are protections. And, because we're talking about out-of-print books, there are other alternatives. There's the physical book, and there's the consumer purchase model, which hopefully will allow rights-holders that come forward to claim their books and would like to encourage an open access model. Google has said we support that. We've continually supported open access.... I think the platform is there to provide the protections, and I think we'll continue some of the dialogue Pam and I have had.

On privacy, I concur that privacy is important.... We just didn't think the settlement was the right place to be discussing it. We think that's its own commonwealth on top of it.... We've made some commitments there, but we agree that some of it still needs to be continually discussed.