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Justice Dept. Opens Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Books Deal
Mad Hamster points out a NY Times report that the US Department of Justice has launched an antitrust inquiry (may require free registration) to take a look at the deal Google has made with book publishers and authors for its Book Search service. Quoting:
"Lawyers for the Justice Department have been in conversations in recent weeks with various groups opposed to the settlement, including the Internet Archive and Consumer Watchdog. More recently, Justice Department lawyers notified the parties to the settlement, including Google, and representatives for the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, that they were looking into various antitrust issues related to the far-reaching agreement. The inquiry does not necessarily mean that the department will oppose the settlement, which is subject to a court review. But it suggests that some of the concerns raised by critics, who say the settlement would unfairly give Google an exclusive license to profit from millions of books, have resonated with the Justice Department."
Update — 4/29 at 14:25 by SS: CNet has new information on the extension Google was seeking in order to contact rightsholders for a decision on whether to join the settlement or opt out. Google had originally asked for 60 days, but a judge has now granted them four more months.
If you guys really want to understand all of this stuff, as I did, I suggest you listen to my interview with Professor James Grimmelmann, who is writing a long, long, long brief examining all the issues for the court about this settlement in an amicus brief from the New York Law School.
He went to Harvard and Yale, interned for the Creative Commons, and used to be a programmer at Microsoft.
It's a lengthy interview, but we cover all the important stuff.
http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=356&mode=one
No, however an issue is folk like you spouting off without knowing what they are talking about, muddying the waters.
The actual real issue is thus:
Right now, Google has been hit with a class action lawsuit on behalf of pretty much every author ever, because it's a class action, if you are a member of the class you are bound by the settlement terms unless you opt out of the class before the deadline in May.
The current settlement agreement provides Google with a number of things, in return for a number of things from Google. However, the biggest issue worrying people is that Google will receive a license to republish out of print books on demand. The so called "orphan works" which are not yet in public domain but are also no longer being printed and therefore can only be found if you are lucky enough to find one in a library or used book store.
They are (potentially) getting this license because as a class lawsuit, the lawyers running the plaintiff's side of the arguments are empowered to speak for all the members of the class and thus can legally agree to this even if the authors involved aren't actually aware of the settlement. Of course, if you are a member of the class and you think the lawyers are doing a crappy job, since all members of the class have an equal voice in the issue, you could always raise Cain to have your own lawyers replace the ones already doing the work.
What worries everyone is that since this license is granted via settlement through a class action lawsuit, many people feel that it would be impossible for anyone else to get the same license. And unfortunately, the judge in this case has already declined to allow other companies to 'join the defendant' so they can get in on the settlement.
All the rest of the noise and turmoil is bullshit and a tempest in a teapot, since part of the settlement will be you can opt-out of Google's publish on demand system if your works would count as 'orphaned works' and if your books are still published, then Google doesn't get the rights to sell you anything, without your explicit permission.
How this turns out is anyone's guess. It's possible that the settlement could go through, giving Google a fairly large mass of work which is out of publication but not yet in public domain, which in theory only they and the individual authors of those works would have permission to reprint. It's possible the settlement could be re-arranged to allow third parties to 'buy into' the setup, preventing anti-trust issues. Or it's possible that the settlement just gets tossed and we go back to square one.
This sort of highlights the flaws in our current copyright system. Not that this settlement is possible, but that there are actually works out there that would be covered by 'orphaned works' clause of it. The point of copyright was never to be "we give you exclusive rights to making copies of this book for a limited time period, then you remove it from our culture forever by burying it".
Actually, they are not distant issues.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was ostensibly passed to protect consumers from the problems inherent in a market free of competition.
Google seems to be in the position to have a monopoly in the book indexing market. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and others hold an oligopolistic position on a panoply financial instruments. In both cases, competition would be/would have been beneficial for the consumer, but only in the former do we see any motion to investigate.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/settlement-resources.html
from the Authors Guild page:
Bolding added by me.
So I may have overspoke when I said the class action was "for every author ever", it looks as if it's for "any author that had a book in the libraries in question".