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.

Comments

Business is business

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Google licenses these works for a fee, and gains the right to redistribute.

Other parties don't license the works, and they complain they are shut out of the market.

Didn't Netscape cry foul in the same way? I'd hate for the Internet Archive to suffer the same fate as Netscape.

Re:Business is business

[drinkypoo]

Google licenses these works for a fee, and gains the right to redistribute.

Usually, in order to get a license you have to get it from someone with the actual legal right to give it. Although, of course, anything is legal if a court decides so...

Re:Business is business

[DerekLyons]

Congress could easily put the orphaned book deal into law, whereby anyone could declare a book orphaned to a government agency that would look the book up in what's currently being published.

Or, in other words, all it takes is one person to decide that they want to override your legal rights and then complain to the appropriate agency to have some faceless bureaucrat to override your legal rights.

If it's not [currently published, whatever that means], you would pay a royalty to that agency, who would keep the money in escrow in case the copyright owner comes forward.

In other words, a faceless bureaucrat can override the rights holders legal right to negotiate royalties or to deny the right to reprint outright.

If and when they do [step forward], they could make a deal with you to keep publishing, or politely ask you to stop.

In other words, the rights holder is now forced to live with the fait accompli of the faceless bureaucrat and hope they can come to deal with the person or company that republished his work without his permission.
 

Such a law would be a much better deal than a specific settlement between one company and the guilds.

Such a law would be a travesty, just like this 'settlement'.

What is actually happening?

[PetriBORG]

Can anyone actually correctly summarize what is going on with this Google book deal, I find it hard to believe that Google is trying to gain exclusive rights over all these unclaimed (copyright wise) books completely and forever for all copies of this book everywhere.

Isn't it really that they just want rights to put up the books that they scanned (and some people that had agreements with them to help scan)? Is there something that would stop people from rescanning those books and posting them up some place else?

Links to clear sources would be best... Where's my Google Security Blanket(TM)!

Re:What is actually happening?

[Chyeld]

The argument for opt-in/opt-out in this particular case basically boils down to whose side of the coin you want to favor when it comes to preserving access to works. If you believe in the Disney model where it's perfectly alright to remove your works from the public, till they become public domain, either because you don't want people to see them any more or to ensure the next time you publish the work (and thus renew the copyright because you remastered it and thus created a 'new' work) you'll have a high demand, then you want an opt-in system.

If you believe in the public good argument which points out the only reason you were given copyrights in the first place was so you could make money from your works in a set amount of time before they became public domain, then the entire concept of "orphaned works" is blasphemous from the start. Remember, the idea of copyright isn't "You control the idea" it's "You control the means to reproduction so everyone has to pay you to get a hold of the idea". In this case, you are for opt-out because while it's still against your beliefs that a book can be purposefully kept out of publication, it's at least the option that allows you to republish those works where the author didn't care enough either way to indicate their desire.

I think though, reading the above, you know my bias on the issue. To me, anything that is copyrighted can be considered a 'derivative work' based on the entire culture you were brought up in. You would not have been able to make it without that, and thus you shouldn't have sole right to control it forever. However, these days, that is what is going on, since many things that have been copyrighted will never physically last long enough to fall into public domain. How many movies and shows from the 1900's to the 1950's have been lost because the film they were printed on crumbled into dust a long time ago. How many books have been lost because they are no longer published and the pulp they were printed on has disintegrated by now.

By the time these works become public domain, how many of them will even be understandable given the inevitable drift in language?

Questioning the whole idea of "antitrust"

[brian0918]

A trust is not inherently bad. So long as no individual rights are violated, there is no cause for concern, and certainly no reason for the government to get involved. Of course, service may degrade, but as it does, customers should be free to switch to alternatives, and other individuals/companies should be free to create and offer those alternatives.

Re:Questioning the whole idea of "antitrust"

[Red Flayer]

Brian, I've noticed from your posts recently that you're pretty much a Mises/Randroid, so I'll understand if we can never find common ground. Just please understand that your arguments have been heard before, and addressed before, a dozen times.

A trust is not inherently bad. [...] customers should be free to switch to alternatives, and other individuals/companies should be free to create and offer those alternatives.

Yet barriers to entry, whether regulatory or otherwise, prevent entry into the market for a small competitor (and therefore there is no place for organic growth into a large competitor). Since we cannot ever have an ideal free market (in the economic sense), we will always have barriers to entry, even if all regulatory barriers were dropped.

Therefore, by default, a trust is bad, because it limits the potential for competition.

I'd like to point out to you that even the Austrian school of economic thought recognizes that corrections must be made for monopolies -- because even if they do not "abuse" their status (which they will, according to most all economic theory), they do limit competition by the very nature of the market. Trusts and monopolies ARE inherently bad, because they limit the ability of the economy to efficiently allocate resources.

Re:I love libraries, but they are obsolete

[east coast]

Why wouldn't they stand in the way? How is downloading a book and different from downloading an album or a movie?

And I'm asking these questions in sincerity. It seems that, for the most part, Slashdotters have a different way of handling the issues the arise from the medias differently. It's almost as if writers get treated with kids gloves in comparison to their musician and film producer peers. If you'd replace "writers guild" with "RIAA" and/or "MPAA" you'd go from people talking over the issue with a somewhat level head to one where we'd hear howls for blood and unflattering references to their sexual preference. But the truth is that these issues are the same, all of them have the same problems and all of them have the same legal protections.