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US Justice has problems with revised Google Settlement

The troubled Google Book Settlement has received another setback. This time from the United States Department of Justice.

The Department has advised the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that despite the substantial progress reflected in a proposed amended settlement agreement in The Authors Guild Inc. et al. v. Google Inc., class certification, copyright and antitrust issues remain.

In its statement of interest filed with the court which is hearing the case, the department stated, "Although the United States believes the parties have approached this effort in good faith and the amended settlement agreement is more circumscribed in its sweep than the original proposed settlement, the amended settlement agreement suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation."

On September 18, 2009, the department submitted views to the court on the original proposed settlement agreement. At that time, the department proposed that the parties consider changes to the agreement that might help address the United States’ concerns.
In the February 4 filing, the department said it recognized that the parties made substantial progress on a number of these issues.

However, the changes do not fully resolve the United States’ concerns, it said.

The settlement agreement between Google and the authors and publishers aims to resolve copyright infringement claims brought against Google by The Authors Guild and five major publishers in 2005 arising from Google’s efforts to digitally scan books contained in several libraries and to make them searchable on the internet.

The district court’s hearing on the proposed amended settlement agreement is scheduled to take place on February 18, 2010.

For detail, see the website

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