From the San Jose Mercury News
Justice Department tells Google to try again on book deal
By Mike Swift
The U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday that Google's latest proposal to create a digital database of millions of out-of-print books still risks giving the company a monopoly in the digital books market and threatens to undermine federal copyright law.
But the department didn't completely shut the door on the plan, urging a federal judge to keep pushing Google and its partners to negotiate an acceptable plan....
Google's plan has drawn the opposition of its business competitors, including Microsoft and Amazon. But even the latest amended settlement, filed in November, has continued to draw intense criticism from others worried about the position Google is trying to build with out-of-print books.
In a letter submitted to Chin and signed by 150 academic authors from universities across the country, University of California-Berkeley law [and information] professor Pamela Samuelson said the amended settlement is not about creating a universal cultural library, but handing Google a commercial monopoly.
"The future of public access to the cultural heritage of mankind embodied in books is too important to leave in the hands of one company and one registry that will have a de facto monopoly," Samuelson and the group of academics argued in a Jan. 27 letter to Chin....