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PostPosted: Thu Apr 30, 2009 3:50 pm
  

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Antitrust division is probing Google Books deal
April 30, 2009 By: Gaurav Singh Category: Science & Tech

Antitrust division is probing Google Books deal: The New York Times reports, the Justice Department’s antitrust division is probing the deal to see if it gives Google monopoly power over books that are still protected by copyright but have fallen out of print.

Critics of the deal have long complained that the revenue-sharing agreement in the settlement only covers Google, and other companies or nonprofits that want to set up rival archives could be forced to pay exorbitantly higher royalties, making the cost of getting into the business too high and leaving Google the only game in town. According to the Times, that argument seems to have caught the attention of the Justice Department.

The settlement would give Google the right to show the books online and profit from subscriptions to libraries and other institutions and from charging for access to individual books. Google agreed to pay $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry that would compensate authors and publishers from the proceeds.

Google’s plan is to let readers search through millions of copyrighted books online, browse passages and purchase copies. But the deal would also allow Google - and only Google - to digitise so-called orphan works, which has raised eyebrows in antitrust circles. Orphan works are books or other materials that are still covered by US copyright law, but it is not clear who owns the rights to them.

Google Book Search aims to scour university libraries across the country, scan every book it can, offer a short excerpt for free on the Web, and sell the entirety of each book, or access to the catalog, for a fee. This both advances Google’s goal of making all information available to the public and nets a tidy piece of revenue for the company.

On Wednesday, Adam Smith, director of product management, Google Book Search wrote a blog post explaining how the Google Book Search settlement will expand the public’s access to books by being able to find out of print and otherwise hard to find books.

In a separate development, Judge Denny Chin of the Federal District Court in New York imposed a four-month delay on the May 5 deadline for authors to opt out of the settlement. Chin is expected to spend up to a month deciding whether the settlement should go forward. Other author groups had complained that the May deadline didn’t give them enough time to study the deal.

Finally, Federal Judge Denny Chin, who is overseeing the settlement, has given authors and other stakeholders an additional four months to file any briefs opposing the deal. This can’t bode well for Google, as the estates of Philip Dick, John Steinbeck, and Arlo Guthrie, whose lawyers asked for the extension, are in all likelihood planning to submit fresh complaints about the arrangement.

Google argues that it has structured the deal so that it’s not exclusive to the company—that is, other groups could choose to scan books as well. The company also says it would make millions of out-of-print books accessible again.

The judge set a final settlement hearing on 7 October for court approval. If approved, it would bring to a close an almost four-year long legal challenge of Google’s plan to make many of the world’s great books searchable online.


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PostPosted: Thu Apr 30, 2009 4:02 pm
  

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I'll assume they meant Woody Guthrie, since Arlo claims to be only "mostly dead". :?


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