US Opens Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Books Deal

[purl4peace]

From the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/te...e.html?_r=1&hp


"SAN FRANCISCO — The Justice Department has begun an inquiry into the antitrust implications of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers over its Google Book Search service, two people briefed on the matter said Tuesday.

Lawyers for the Justice Department have been in conversations in recent weeks with various groups opposed to the settlement, including the Internet Archive and Consumer Watchdog. More recently, Justice Department lawyers notified the parties to the settlement, including Google, and representatives for the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, that they were looking into various antitrust issues related to the far-reaching agreement."

..............

"But critics say that Google alone would have a license that covers millions of so-called orphan books, whose authors cannot be found or whose rights holders are unknown. Some librarians fear that with no competition, Google will be free to raise prices for access to the collection."

[phenomshel]

Well, crap. There goes my access to out of print books in ebook format....

[Andybaby]

google will fight for the ability to do what they want, they believe in free access of information and indexing history sounds like something they very much want to do, starting with the easiest and least hard drive space accumulating, Books.

in 10-15 years i expect google then to index and host all music ever

than 10 years after that, all Video ever.

than 10 years after that, google will take over the world, by being the most trusted institution to ever have existed. witth free access to information for all, and we will live in a Utopian society.

the Google Race will then reach out to the stars looking for more information, giving free access to its library to all young races it comes across, and hoping to learn from the old ones.

[MV64]

You can still download straight from Google into PDF.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Andybaby

google will fight for the ability to do what they want, they believe in free access of information and indexing history sounds like something they very much want to do, starting with the easiest and least hard drive space accumulating, Books.

in 10-15 years i expect google then to index and host all music ever

than 10 years after that, all Video ever.

than 10 years after that, google will take over the world, by being the most trusted institution to ever have existed. witth free access to information for all, and we will live in a Utopian society.

the Google Race will then reach out to the stars looking for more information, giving free access to its library to all young races it comes across, and hoping to learn from the old ones.

And they will change their name to "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by purl4peace

"SAN FRANCISCO — The Justice Department has begun an inquiry into the antitrust implications of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers over its Google Book Search service, two people briefed on the matter said Tuesday.

Note, this is just an inquiry so they can determine IF there are any antitrust implications. This is pretty much standard procedure for the justice department when there are any large corporations that start getting into new business areas, or when two large companies merge, etc. Nothing to really get excited about yet. If they come back and say "yes, this is an antitrust violation", then that's news. Most of the time they don't do that though.

[phenomshel]

I hope you're right, Shaggy. Again, merely from a greed standpoint, LOL. How long does this typically hold up proceedings?

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Note, this is just an inquiry so they can determine IF there are any antitrust implications. This is pretty much standard procedure for the justice department when there are any large corporations that start getting into new business areas, or when two large companies merge, etc. Nothing to really get excited about yet. If they come back and say "yes, this is an antitrust violation", then that's news. Most of the time they don't do that though.

Exactly, inquiries always happen when deals are over a certain threshold, just like the other financial dealings.

And even IF they come back with a "yes", that still will not mean it's in fact a violation. Given the way the Fed here has allowed other "agreements", mergers, acquisitions by any number of companies have been allowed to fly through, I doubt any violation will be found. You can suspect more than the publishing lobbyist money is behind thing, count in Live.com (MS) as well as the ebay/yahoo connection and Amazon is sure to be in the mix also. Heck, Apple probably would love for Google to go away also.