From the Huffington Post
Why is the Antitrust Division Investigating the Google Book Search Settlement?
By Pamela Samuelson
Google reached a settlement agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers in October 2008 aimed at ending lawsuits, brought in 2005, that challenged Google's unauthorized scanning of in-copyright books for its Google Book Search (GBS) project. As I explained last Monday, the settlement is audacious because it uses the legal jujitsu of the class action procedure to give Google a breathtaking license to all in-copyright books. The agreement authorizes Google to create a digital library of these books and to commercialize most of them. Google will compensate rights holders for commercialization of these books either directly if they signed up with the Google partner program or indirectly through a newly created Book Rights Registry (BRR) whose job is to distribute money to rights holders signed up with BRR.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division announced in late April 2009 that it was investigating whether the settlement agreement is, as some critics charge, an agreement that will unreasonably restrain trade or create a monopoly that would enable Google to extract monopoly rents from the books and further entrench Google's dominance in the search market....