IDG News Service - The U.S. Department of Justice has come out against the proposed agreement to settle copyright lawsuits that authors and major publishers filed against Google over the search company's book search program.
"This Court should reject the Proposed Settlement in its current form and encourage the parties to continue negotiations," reads a filing the DOJ submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late on Friday.
The proposed settlement must be modified by Google and the plaintiffs so that it complies with U.S. copyright and antitrust laws, the DOJ said in its filing, a 32-page Statement of Interest.
The DOJ's opinion is likely to be seen a major blow against Google, which has been in court over this matter for about four years and is eager to get the case settled.
The DOJ had until Friday to submit a written report to the court on the findings of a formal investigation over whether the proposed agreement violated U.S. laws.
Rumors that the DOJ had started reviewing the proposed agreement surfaced in April. The DOJ confirmed that it was conducting a formal investigation in July.
Those following the case have been widely anticipating the result of the DOJ's probe of the proposed agreement, which has been loudly praised and criticized since it was announced in October of last year.
Book authors and the Authors Guild filed a class action lawsuit, while five large publishers filed a separate lawsuit as representatives of the Association of American Publishers' membership.
The lawsuits were brought after Google launched a program to scan and index sometimes entire collections from the libraries of major universities without always getting permission from the copyright owners of the books.
Google made the text of the books searchable on its book search engine, claiming it's protected by the fair use principle because it only showed snippets of text for in-copyright books it had scanned without permission.
However, after two years of negotiations, Google and the plaintiffs reached middle ground, hammering out a wide-ranging settlement agreement that calls for Google to pay US$125 million and in exchange gives the search company rights to display meatier chunks of these in-copyright books, not just snippets.
In addition, Google would make it possible for people to buy online access to these books. The agreement would also allow institutions to buy subscriptions to books and make them available to their constituents.
A royalty system would also be set up to compensate authors and publishers for access to their works via the creation of the Book Rights Registry. This would be an independent, nonprofit entity entrusted with distributing payments to copyright holders earned through online access to their works. Revenue will come from institutional subscriptions, book sales and ad-revenue sharing.
Today, many government agencies – civilian and defense – find themselves in a technology quandary: the volume of data that must be stored is growing rapidly, while shrinking budgets are limiting capital expenditures (i.e. – servers, storage devices, etc.) required to store all of this data.
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