“The current settlement proposal would stifle innovation and competition in favor of a monopoly over the access, distribution, and pricing of the largest collection of digital books in the world,” said the Open Book Alliance, a group that includes Amazon.com, Microsoft, and another Google rival, Yahoo Inc. The alliance also includes authors and several nonprofit organizations.
The Justice Department’s lawyers, as well as a long line of the settlement’s opponents and supporters, will have an opportunity to elaborate on their arguments in a New York court hearing scheduled Oct. 7.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google conceivably could use the Justice Department’s filing as a road map for navigating to new settlement terms before the hearing.
In its current form, the settlement would entrust Google with a digital database containing millions of copyright-protected books, including volumes no longer being published. The internet search leader would act as the sales agent for the authors and publishers, giving 63 percent of the revenue to the copyright holders. Authors and publishers could either set their own prices for their books, or rely on a formula drawn up by Google–a provision that has raised fears of the partnership turning into a price-gouging cartel.
The Justice Department sided with those arguments, saying the settlement could lessen competition among U.S. publishers. The agency also expressed concern that Google would gain a monopoly on so-called “orphan works”–out-of-print books that are still protected by copyright but whose writers’ whereabouts are unknown.
The arrangement “appears to create a dangerous probability that only Google would have the ability to market to libraries and other institutions a comprehensive digital-book subscription,” the department said in its brief.
Hoping to ease those concerns, Google has promised to share its electronic index with its rivals–an idea that has drawn an icy response from Amazon.com, one of the world’s biggest book merchants and the maker of the Kindle, an electronic reader.
Google already has gone into some of the nation’s largest libraries to scan about 6 million out-of-print books into its electronic index. So far, though, it has only been able to show snippets of those digital copies. The settlement would clear the way for Google to sell all those out-of-print books and scan even more into its index.
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