It was a tough summer for the Google book search settlement. The proposed deal, which would give Google Inc. the right to scan and display millions of copyrighted books, was lambasted as anticompetitive by rivals (Microsoft Corporation, Amazon Inc., and Yahoo! Inc.), the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, and the governments of Germany and France (to name just a few). In September the U.S. Department of Justice urged the federal district court judge hearing the case to reject the settlement as constructed, because of its potential violations of antitrust, copyright, and class action law. Even digital rights advocates, who usually cheerlead for new open forms of information dissemination, gave it hell. Brewster Kahle, founder and director of the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco, called the proposed settlement “a new and unsettling form of media consolidation.”
Despite this opposition, a deal still seems likely. The Justice Department could have effectively killed the agreement, but instead tempered its criticism of the settlement with praise for its aspiration, and even suggested possible fixes for some of the problems it identified. As of press time, lawyers for litigants Google, The Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers were scrambling to revise the settlement to address the Justice Department’s concerns, and Manhattan federal district court judge Denny Chin had agreed to indefinitely postpone a scheduled October fairness hearing to give negotiators time to make changes.
