The Justice Department is looking into whether a deal between Google, the Author’s Guild and the Association of American
Publishers represents a potential antitrust case.
As reported by The New York Times, Justice Department attorneys have been
chatting over the past few weeks with Google and other parties involved in the
Google Book Search settlement, which gave Google the right to scan copyrighted
books for online use and potential sale in exchange for, among other
concessions, creating a nonprofit Book Rights Registry to handle digital rights
issues.
The questioning of Google, the Author’s Guild and the Association of
American Publishers, however, does not necessarily mean that the Justice
Department will attempt to scuttle the deal over antitrust issues.
No public comment has been forthcoming from Google or the Justice Department
over the matter, which is still ongoing.
Earlier in April 2009, a nonprofit watchdog group called on the Department
of Justice to investigate Google’s plan to scan “orphan books” into a database
of digital text. "Orphan" books are out-of-print volumes that remain
under copyright, but whose rights-holders cannot be found.
An advocate for Consumer Watchdog, John Simpson, wrote a letter to U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder asking for government intervention in Google’s
settlement with the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers,
arguing that it should have been reviewed to see if it met "the interests
of consumers."
Critics of the deal argued that Google had effectively been given a monopoly
over digitized books by preventing Microsoft, Yahoo or other competitors from offering better deals to
authors in the future. The settlement stated that Google would have the same
terms in negotiating as any future competitor.
"The proposed settlement protects Google from such potentially damaging
exposure, but provides no protection for others," Simpson argued in his
letter. "This effectively is a barrier for competitors to enter the
digital book business."
Google’s entrance into the digitized-book arena, which has become
increasingly competitive, has been much publicized. In March 2009, the search-engine giant paired with Sony to
announce that its free public-domain eBooks would be available for the Sony
Reader. It marked the first time that Google’s scanned books were available
for an eReader in an ePub format.
By doing so, Sony increased the library of books available on its eReader to
600,000, eclipsing the 245,000 volumes on offer through Amazon’s much-publicized Kindle library.
In May 2008, despite having digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million
journal articles, Microsoft shut down its Live Search Books and Live Search
Academic projects due to construction and maintenance costs, leaving Google to
run relatively unopposed in the online digital library space.
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