Legal News

The Google Books Project: An Antitrust Case in the Making?

By Ashby Jones

For now, the legal hangups concerning Google’s huge “Google Books” project mostly involve copyright issues. Manhattan federal judge Denny Chin (he of the 150-year Bernie Madoff sentence) is currently reviewing a large and complex settlement agreement reached last year between Google and a handful of publishers. The publishers sued the search-engine giant in 2005, claiming the company’s Google Books project — an effort to digitize huge volumes of books and ultimately make them publicly availalble — violated their copyrights.

Judge Chin is slated to make a final determination on the proposed settlement, which allows Google ultimately to allow access to preview of books that are still under copyright but are out of print, and to sell access to them, later this year. Click here for a Washington Post article from last fall on the settlement.

But regardless of what Judge Chin decides, Google is pushing ahead with the broader project. And according to a Boston Globe article out Friday, Google has already scanned some 10 million books, of which 1.5 million are now available online for free. A growing concern, according to the Globe, deals not with not copyright but antitrust: that Google will end up with monopolistic control of access to millions of scanned digital books.

"Google is creating a mega bookstore the likes of which we have never seen,'' said Maura Marx, executive director of Open Knowledge Commons, a Boston nonprofit organization. "People are very uncomfortable with the idea that one corporation has so much power over such a large collection of knowledge.''

Such concerns aren’t slowing Google down, however. "We're going full steam ahead, no matter what happens with the settlement,'' said Don Clancy, the head of the project for Google, to the Globe. Google's ultimate vision, Clancy said, is an "uber book platform'' in which millions of digital books are available in a marketplace open to publishers, consumers, and online bookstores. Clancy said the company continues to scan "thousands of books a day.''

Clancy said the possibilities for Google Books have yet to be determined. "Will we be done when we have 40 million books? 50 million books?'' Clancy said. "We don't know yet.''

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 24, 2009 (boomark / email).