DOJ Turns Up the Heat On Google's Book Deal 64
narramissic writes "It appears that after its initial review of a deal that would settle a lawsuit publishers and authors filed against Google over the latter's book search engine, the DOJ is leaning toward challenging the proposed settlement. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported late Tuesday that the DOJ is now sending civil investigative demands (CIDs) to organizations involved in the deals, a more formal approach than its initial information-gathering efforts. But Authors Guild Executive Director Paul Aiken said the fact that the DOJ is reviewing the proposed settlement isn't surprising, considering Google is involved: 'Any big deal that involves Google is going to get a look from the Justice Department.'"
Re:Look (Score:5, Informative)
The authors guild wants to sell monopoly rights to google. Rights which are not theirs to sell, if they even exist at all.
The exclusive right to scan and sell any orphaned book, which might very well contradict copyright laws.
The exclusive right to decide what constitutes an "out of print" work, and republish it.
There are others, those are just the two I can recall off the top of my head.
Google would be released from the legal obligation to seek permission of copyright holders first, whether the holders are members of the authors guild or not. As you can probably imagine, there's no way in hell the authors guild has the legal capacity to grant that permission for all authors (including foreign authors).
So google and the authors guild are trying to create an illegal monopoly.
Google is NOT an a monopoly. (Score:3, Informative)
I can understand why they're looking into Google. They're a monopoly
Monopoly? What the hell are you talking about?
Google is an advertiser.. Just like thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of other companies on the Interweb and in real life. Google surely has a tremendous market share, but they don't prevent anyone from advertising with other companies... And these other companies get a LOT of advertising despite Google's presence. Hell, Yahoo! is still worth billions of dollars, and their products don't have nearly the crazy media glitz that Google seems to get. Lots of people still advertise with other companies like Yahoo! and Google's competition can still turn huge profits. Being #1 doesn't make your a monopoly.
The same goes with their web search product: They aren't even close to being a monopoly. I have a choice to use Yahoo, or Metacrawler or Ask or some other God awful search engine. What Google IS though, is very good. Because of this, most people *choose* to use it. They have a lot of inertia because they do lots of cool, free things and capitalize upon their good will and free publicity. Google is not a monopoly. Also, their search product isn't perfect... It would take some clever work, but any individual or company that creates a search engine which can compete with the quality of Google and offer something useful and novel could very well compete with them.
If Google had an exclusive deal with major Internet browser companies and/or ISPs to block competitors in the advertising and/or search markets... Well, that would be much closer to a monopoly.
Re:Google is NOT a monopoly (Score:3, Informative)
Google decided to go ahead and copy all these books digitally into their archive, and the Author's Guild sued on behalf of the works to which they *do* control the copyright (or at least the right to represent the authors in legal matters). Somewhere along the line the Author's Guild asked for the lawsuit to be promoted to a class-action, which means that the outcome of the suit is binding for all possible plaintiffs (in this case, authors).
Usually class-action lawsuits are good things (especially for the lawyers who get to prosecute the case, but also marginally for the little people involved). You and I don't have the resources to take on big tobacco, for example, but once somebody does, qualified people are in on that suit by default (usually with court-mandated notice and an opportunity to opt-out). I myself made a tiny bit of money out of the Best-Buy/MSN settlement where they were signing people up and charging them for Internet service without telling them.
So in this case the Author's Guild was granted by the court the right to represent all authors in this matter. Then they settled with Google, and the terms of the settlement were especially wide ranging. Then the judge involved ok'ed it, again with the traditional notices and opportunity to opt out.
So that's how it happened. It's shady as hell, but it's the way class-action suits work in this country, and entirely legit. Perhaps the judge involved in the case made some errors in judgement, I'm not educated enough on the matter to say.
Finally, regarding your monopoly claims, you're right but you're entirely off-topic. You don't have to have a monopoly to engage in illegal anti-competitive behavior. Dumping, just to offer one example, is pretty much always illegal, regardless of your market-share. The FTC has a bunch more information on their site. The DoJ is not necessarily off the mark looking into this case (they haven't even decided they have the grounds to file a suit yet, so any rush to judgement would be premature).