“Google Inc.’s six-year struggle to bring all the world’s books to the Internet suffered another big setback at the hands of a federal judge,” Amir Efrati and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg report for The Wall Street Journal.
“Judge Denny Chin, in a ruling filed in U.S. district court in Manhattan, rejected a 2008 settlement that Google forged with author and publisher groups to make millions of books available online,” Efrati and Trachtenberg report. “The 48-page decision concludes that the $125 million deal would give the Internet giant the ability to ‘exploit’ books without the permission of copyright owners, echoing the U.S. Justice Department’s concerns about the deal.
“‘While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many,’ Judge Chin wrote, Google’s current pact would ‘simply go too far.’ The deal would ‘give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission,’ he said,” Efrati and Trachtenberg report. “In his decision, Judge Chin also noted antitrust concerns related to the settlement, including that ‘would arguably give Google control over the search market’ for books.”
Efrati and Trachtenberg report, “The judge denied the settlement between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers ‘without prejudice,’ meaning they could submit a revised pact that would better protect copyright owners. He also suggested a way to revise the deal: rather than let copyright owners of books ‘opt out’ of the settlement, copyright owners should be given the choice to ‘opt in.'”
Read more in the full article here.