The United States Justice Department on Friday told the New York District Court to reject the proposed settlement of the controversial book deal of Google Inc. with authors and publishers in Europe, which would allow the Internet giant to create digitized copies of books that were already out-of-prints.
In a document submitted to the NY court, the Justice Department said that the lower court should immediately reject the settlement case proposed by Google to allow parties involved to further negotiate, saying that the digital library should comply with antitrust and copyright laws.
The filing was in connection with the 2005 class suit filed by various online book stores, authors, and publishers, which earlier accused Google of monopolizing and violating copyright laws for scanning thousands of books and sell them in its online e-book store.
Based on the merit of the case, Google would pay publishers and authors for titles that would be sold in its book search website. The search engine giant and the concerned parties reached a settlement agreement October 2008.
Rival online book stores criticized Google’s action and filed an appeal to the NY court, saying that the settlement was being used by the website to monopolize the selling of the digital copies of books.
Also, other libraries and rights activists expressed fear that the e-books that would be sold in Google’s book search will become too expensive for consumers since it has the sole rights to sell the books online.
The deal might also be used by the Internet giant to monopolize advertising deals to the website since it has the potential to create massive hits from people looking for out-of-print copies of books in the website.
The attorney generals argued that a large number of authors could not be identified in major titles, saying that money produced by these titles should go to the states and not the Book Registry Board, which was earlier established by the company to help it identify titles that would be available in the online market.
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