Google Books III - Too BIG?

On July 24, 2009, The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog reported on judicial review of the proposed copyright settlement between Google and book publishers. As previously reported here, Google embarked on a massive project to digitize every book ever written and was sued by publishers for copyright infringement. The two sides reached a proposed settlement agreement last year. Having sent Bernard Madoff away for 150 years, New York federal judge Denny Chin is now trying to complete review of this complex copyright settlement.

Law Blog reports:

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.’’

These are some of the concerns raised in my post earlier this year. The WSJ Law Blog reports that Google is moving "full steam ahead" with the book project. Stay tuned for further developments.