GBS: Some Statistics


These come from the declaration of Tiffaney Allen, describing Rust Consulting’s work on administering the settlement, at pages 5–6:

As of February 8, Rust Consulting receiver 6,818 timely requests for exclusion. In addition, Rust Consulting has received 13 requests for exclusion after the January 28, 2010 opt-out deadline. …

As of February 8, 2010, Rust Consulting has received 1,846 completed hard copy claim forms, and 42,604 claim forms were completed using the Settlement Website. The total number of Books claimed by those 44,450 claimants is 1,125,339. The total number of Inserts claimed by those 44,450 claimants is 21,829. In addition, Rust Consulting has received 485 lists including approximately 8,164 Books and approximately 5,536 Inserts from authors or publishers requesting assistance through the simplified claiming process.

Of the 1,107,620 Books claimed online, 619,531 are classified as out-of-print (not Commercially Available) and 488,089 are classified as in-print (Commercially Available).

Of the 44,450 claiming Rightsholders, 40,058 are members of the Author Sub-Class and 4,392 are members of the Publisher Sub-Class. Agents that may be claiming on behalf of multiple authors are, to be conservative, calculated as a single author.

Of the 44,450 claiming Rightsholders, 23,036 were located in the U.S., 3,167 in the UK, 4,035 in Canada, and 2,249 in Australia. this totals 32,487 claiming rightsholders from these four countries, or 73% of the total number of claiming Rightsholders. Location of Rightsholders was determined by the individual’s web browser environment.


Some of the opt-ins will be double: From both publisher and author, and probably the same book from multiple publishers who licensed rights to it at different times.

Fran


James, Allen’s Exhibit D in Allen_declaration3.pdf contains some tables that look like they contain very useful information. Unfortunately, the columns in the tables aren’t labeled. Is there a way to ask for clarification, either prior to or during the Hearing? My best guess is that the tables show that 2/3 of the claims were made by publishers, which would be damning if it could be proved.


The opts for some books will be split - publisher opts in; author opts out.


Apparently thanks to EFF, we have a complete version of the tables in Rust Consulting’s Exhibit D, which confirm that 71% of the book claims come from publishers. The new document is at http://www.eff.org/files/Google%20Stats%20Exhibit%20D.pdf.