Once Again, US DoJ Opposes Google Book Search

angry tapir and several other readers passed along the news that the US Department of Justice has come out against the revised agreement to settle copyright lawsuits brought against Google by authors and publishers. This is a major blow to Google's efforts to build a massive digital-books marketplace and library. From the DoJ filing (PDF): "...the [Amended Settlement Agreement] suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the Court in this litigation. As a consequence, the ASA purports to grant legal rights that are difficult to square with the core principle of the Copyright Act that copyright owners generally control whether and how to exploit their works during the term of copyright. Those rights, in turn, confer significant and possibly anticompetitive advantages on a single entity — Google."

Comments

angst badger

[circletimessquare]

well named

listen up, anxiety ridden adrenaline filled large rodent:

the AUTHORS make money from prominence they don't currently have in current a system which buries their works in obscurity

understand?

and that IS progress, for consumers and authors. the only people who lose out are traditional distributors

as for google benefitting, yes, but this new understanding can easily be divorced from google. i am saying "do away with copyright", i'm not saying "give all copyright to google". if google is the first to move against traditional distributor model inanity, good for them