DoJ Recommends NY Court Reject Google Book Deal 124
eldavojohn writes "The BBC and others are reporting on the US Department of Justice's recommendation to a New York court that they reject the Google book deal. The deal has received considerable attention, but for the most part it has been negative."
Lets just... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Let me guess, not an artist, writer, or musician, are you?
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Let's just say that I don't run Windows for personal use even in a VM. It's just got nothing I need in it. And with very rare exceptions I don't buy software even for Linux. Sometime I do it just to encourage the vendor - RedHat, WordPerfect, X-Plane, Unreal Tournament 2003, World of Warcraft are I think the only ones (WOW under wine). In each case I tried the stuff for a few days and binned it.
I don't steal the stuff - it's just been many years since there wasn't a free and open solution for something
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Why should you have the right to use my programs for free?
Normally you would have a point. But:
Why do I have to pay TV contribution when I don't have a working TV?
Why do I have to pay compensation for local copyright holders' when I buy a photocopier? I use it explicitly for my job (replication of technical studies done by me).
My cousin has a traditional morning cafe. Why did he have to pay compensation for the local RIAA? He did not have a radio in his cafe until recently.
There is a, state owned, special newspaper which publishes all the new laws that are ma
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Why should you have the right to use my programs for free?
If you absolutely hate the idea of other people benefiting from your software then you just keep it to yourself. It's that simple.
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That's what a basic income is for... (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income [wikipedia.org]
Or just rethink "work" in general:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html [whywork.org]
Also:
"Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html [gnu.org]
Regarding: "what reason would the guy have to make the music in the first place? Sure, there's the love of music, but some people ... have to put food on the table."
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Well, we also have robots on Planet Earth:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation [hizook.com]
What does that robot mean about the future of most jobs requiring hand-eye coordination?
See also:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm [educationa...ocracy.org]
A basic income almost passed under Nixon. :-)
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How about "Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes": :-)
http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0395710901 [amazon.com]
Or:
"No Contest: The Case Against Competition"
http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254 [amazon.com]
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Ah sweet sweet welfare! Where the poorest and laziest of humanity can drive Cadillacs and dine on steak whereas everybody else is sweating there collective lives away, barely making ends meet, working for the "man".
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And what about Debian GNU/Linux? Or the FOSS movement? And so on. Take a look at this video and tell me anything about mainstream economics is going to make sense soon:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation [hizook.com]
Shakespeare had this problem. (Score:1)
The answer was to add some trivial content to the old story, sex it up, and present it live in a comfy theatre where people would go be seen viewing it because it was cool. His marketing team was awesome.
For 5000 years (Score:1)
For 5000 years the deal has been that if you stuff was worth listening to, people would pay to hear you play it. After a while, if you did well, the song became part of the culture.
It's only since the invention of eternal copyright that an artist expected residuals. And even that is a trap... The old must be forever deprecated for the new, so your art that might become an eternal theme must be abolished for the latest pop tart. This can't be done if copyright is rational.
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Yeah, JK is rollin in the dough. she's also the most popular author on the planet, for about 8 years straight, and basically introduced half this generation to reading as a pleasure activity. She might not deserve as much as she got (about $200 million last year), but she still deserves a big stinking load of money.
There's plenty of fat which ought to be cut, the copyright system is broken horribly, I agree with the rest of slashdot on that. But JK Rowling is the shit, don't pretend otherwise.
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I doubt, she would have written another book, if she couldn't make a living from the first.
There is a problem but the solution is not a complete abolishment of copyright.
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Quite frankly I could have been without the Harry Potter series, thankyouverymuch. They're a load of hogwarts, and I don't understand the fixation on this universe by anyone between 5 and 85.
Having said that, J.K. Rowling is also the Metallica of the publishing world. Got a bunch of money from her fans, then insults them.
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And whilst we're making sensible linkages (when you think about it, actual existing people really equivalent to arbitrary legally constructed restrictions on free speech) like that I think that standardised egg sizes is the solution to the problem.
Just think of the pineapples.
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Oh, and $2000 is a bit low. If
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You are actually right. Let's decide that only the copyright holders are allowed to read the books, and we're done. That's pretty much what they're aiming at for music, and books are sure to follow the same path.
What will it mean for public domain books? Well... no copyright holders means that those books will be removed from the market altogether. That way, the situation is really clear cut.
Re:Worst summary ever (Score:4, Insightful)
Summary: OMG searchable books! Think of the copyright holders!
Re:Worst summary ever (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that depends. How long have you been dead and your work out of print?
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So you think it's OK for Google to co-opt my rights as an author to control my work - for profit - without either my permission or compensation?
So you think it's OK for you to maintain control of your out-of-print and otherwise unavailable work ad-infinitum?
What then is my motivation to produce for distribution future works?
Money. Because you're no longer making any off of the out-of-print books that the Google book deal covers.
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So you think it's OK for you to maintain control of your out-of-print and otherwise unavailable work ad-infinitum?
Yes. It's mine, I made it. Why should I *not* have a say over work that *I* created?
Re:Worst summary ever (Score:5, Informative)
Because it's simple:
Copyright law is an agreement between "the people" (aka the government) and you. The first part of the agreement is that you enjoy protection and exclusive rights to copy and distribute. The second part of the agreement, that copyright holders often forget about, ignore or otherwise disregard, is that in exchange for said protection, the works would be released into the public domain upon expiry of the term of protection.
Here's the problem. The agreement is now lasting longer than the media it is distributed upon. This makes the works for which the people offered you copyright protection, unavailable to the people by the time the agreement expires thereby depriving the people of their public domain works and in fact the cultural and historical value of the works.
By having it available in digital archives, there is an increased chance that the works will still be available whenever the term of the copyright protection agreement has ended.
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Doesn't the public hold the rights to the underlying language?
What if we just rescind your license to the words?
Oh, and the society you got your ideas and education from would like their cultural memes back as well.
You didn't create your work out of a void. Without the supporting culture, you would be little more than a quick witted animal. Certainly, with no one educating you, you would not have produced anything. Where is your payment back to the thousands of people who influenced you?
The very culture
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The contract is: you make it public, eventually it will be public domain.
The founding fathers give you a limited time to control it, and the moment you created it, you accepted the contract. If you don't want people copying it, keep it locked up. Otherwise, it will eventually be public domain and you get no say in the matter. Don't like it? Move to another country.
Also, in case you want to whine some more, it was originally ~20 years. So you're getting more than was intended already.
Besides, the real p
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The contract is: you make it public, eventually it will be public domain. The founding fathers give you a limited time to control it, and the moment you created it, you accepted the contract. If you don't want people copying it, keep it locked up. Otherwise, it will eventually be public domain and you get no say in the matter. Don't like it? Move to another country.
The Google Agreement also covers books where Google can't seem to find the copyright holder. That Google can't find them doesn't mean that the holder's rights disappear. This is all just a big land grab by Google, and you know perfectly well that if it had been Microsoft, the cries here would be deafening.
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As long as Google makes a good faith effort to ascertain the owners of any copyright interest in its works, I have no problem with it opening the barn door to readers.
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It should not be up to Google to decide that they can publish a work that is still protected by copyright just because they can't determine who the copyright owner is whether they've made a good faith effort or not. Instead, Copyright law should be updated to take into account orphaned works and what one can and can't do with them.
I can suggest three possibilities for handling orphaned works:
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What then is my motivation to produce for distribution future works?
Ego? Contribution to humanity? Bragging rights? The sales of books caused by Googles advertisement of them? It's not as if human creativity suddenly popped into existence when copyright laws started.
On the other hand, this settlement seems pretty deeply wrong. It's pretty clear that the authors understood one form of the copyright law when they wrote their books. A change should involve serious debate and democratic processes. On the other hand, nobody but a big corporation could have pushed somethin
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If google have online publishing rights, what happened to your rights as the author ? Or the rest of us as members of the public domain ? Shouldn't these rights be the property of the state, i.e. the US, not a corporation ?
Maybe I'm misled, and it is perfectly legal for me to publish out of print books once this thing is settled, but I have a sneaking suspicion that only google have the rights now.
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I think we can all agree that changes to the system that allow out of print books to again be produced and distributed is not a bad thing. What is a bad thing is creating a situation in which Google becomes the sole party responsible for the distribution of these books. I would feel much better if it wasn't Google, but rather a consortium of interests; corporate, academic, libraries, archivists, etc. Then one would feel that this wasn't simply a monopoly being handily delivered into Google's hands.
Or to
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No; I dismissed his argument (he deserves our charity because he's an author or else nobody will produce books) and supported his conclusion (the google settlement is crap and badly thought out). Maybe you should learn to read before posting?
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If money is your only motivation for writing books, don't.
If you can't write a book in the age of the internet purely for the joy that other people might read and appreciate it, or use a searchable database of books to market yours, go get a real job. I cannot help you.
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I've been doing some writing myself, and it's purely for the enjoyment of the writing itself.
I'll not claim to be a great writer by any stretch, but it's relaxing, and a good way to pass the time when gaming just doesn't cut it.
Some writers do, however, make it a full time job. They have to if they want to meet the demand for their works, or to meet a publishing obligation.
Now, all things considered, I still think the suit against Google is not good. If they're working with out of print a
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And no, this is not piracy come home to roost. I don't care if individuals take and read my work without paying. I seriously object to a massive corporation taking my work and making money from it, without giving me my dues. Google are legally monetising piracy here. If you can't see the difference, well, sucks to be
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I already am. I'm not responsible for marketing at work, and my fun projects are Open Source.
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Yes,
Searching books is useful.
You should not have strict control over who sees your work if you publish it.
Searching books costs you nothing (even in opportunity cost)
each copyright holder implementing their own search is useless (the sum is more than the parts).
The only authors I can see concerned are either plagiarists, embarrassed by their work, or control freaks.
Unless your argument is that your profit scheme for your books was to license them for use in a gigantic book search database I don't see how t
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What then is my motivation to produce for distribution future works?
If you're worth a damn as a writer, you don't have to ask that question.
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That hasn't kept anyone from posting. The articles don't go into detail what exactly the deal is, either.
Under the deal - the product of a legal suit - Google would establish a $125m (£77m) fund to compensate those whose works it published online.
It would establish a Book Rights Registry so that authors whose work it digitised were paid when their material was viewed online.
There already exists a open source download tool [codeplex.com] with which you can fetch 95% -- as much as Google offers/digitized -- of any book, so the fear is understandable.
I guess flatrate for authors or making it a just a preview to find out if this is the right book might be options that the authors will agree on.
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I have a book whose copyright is registered in the USA, and I object to this deal. Not so much because people can download my book illegally - google for the title and the first hit is a site where you can do that - but because it gives Google an unfair competitive advantage that they obtained by breaking the law. I would have no objections if the settlement provided nondiscriminatory licensing, but Google wilfully violated copyright law and now gets to benefit from a monopoly on distributing a large numb
Only a good thing if (Score:5, Insightful)
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What would a better deal look like in your opinion?
Re:Only a good thing if (Score:5, Insightful)
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However, that is probably not what you were asking. In my opinion, the worst part of the deal is that it's exclusive to Google, and that third parties cannot get into it. This makes Google kind of the digital gateway for a lot of content. And I like Google, but at one time I liked HP, too. Organizations change over time, and it can be dangerous to make one group the digi
Re:Only a good thing if (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually you are dead wrong. If you are dead broke and receiving SSI disability and Medicare you will get that transplant. But if you have a bit of money and are not on SSI you would not be able to afford the anti rejection meds which cost about 3K per month and you will not receive the surgery, Insurance usually will not cover these medications.
This gets even darker. If you go to a hospital with an emergency condition and no insurance you will be treated. However, i
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I've yet to hear of a single bonafide case of a person in the USA dying because he/she was refused medical treatment...
Crystal Lee Sutton
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old friend of mine has recently lost most of her sight , she can't use her PC any more because of it.
Her husband told me there is an operation which would restore her sight if she is operated on within the next three weeks, (about two weeks now it was about a week ago he told me). trouble is they don't have insurance, its not counted as a medical emergency and if medicaid will cover it , it normally takes 3 months or so to get the go ahead by which time it will be too late.
so yes she isn't dying because of
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If I were her I would fly to Canada or Europe and see if they'll treat it.
Exclusivity is the root of all evil in this... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the settlement was "any other company may also have the same rights under the same terms", it would be a VERY good deal.
But with the exclusivity, it is very bad. Without the exclusivity, someone else could take the time to do the scanning, and the sales. EG, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, or even a new startup.
But with the exclusivity, you give Google a monopoly over out-of-print books.
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If you are so woried about not making any money from your out-of-print books, maybe you should consider printing them again?
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It's not just about making money. (I know -- the horror!) It's also about control and access. Why should any one company, even Google, get sole and exclusive rights to works in the public domain?
Re:Exclusivity is the root of all evil in this... (Score:5, Informative)
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Google is optionally making their scans available to at least one other companies. Some of them are reputed to be of very poor quality, but nobody else is allowed to make them. Sometimes because of this court decision, and other times because of the exclusive contracts that Google made with the various libraries that contained copies of the out-of-print works. (And sometimes, I guess, both.)
I've not been well pleased by the way Google has been courting exclusive control.
P.S.: The company that I'm aware
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Unfortunately you are not correct in this case because it was a class action suit.
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I'm currently reading Confucious' works (thank you, Project Gutenberg), and in "The Sayings of Confucious" book 2 appears the quote, "Think no evil."
I think Google is secretly a communist organization. :)
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There's nothing inherently evil about communism; like all governments it will slip into evil if not regulated by the people, but since that hardly sets it apart from capitalism (there are real lessons to be learned in that department by what America is doing in the world right now — shit, we filled up mass graves with Panamanians for the purposes of securing profits and now people are suprised when they hear about the same thing in the middle east?)
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Google doesn't get exclusive rights. Read section 2.4 [thepublicindex.org] of the settlement agreement:
Non-Exclusivity of Authorizations. The authorizations granted to Google in this Settlement Agreement are non-exclusive only, and nothing in this Settlement Agreement shall be construed as limiting any Rightsholder's right to authorize, through the Registry or otherwise, any Person, including direct competitors of Google, to use his, her or its Books or Inserts in any way, including ways identical to those provided for under this Settlement Agreement.
Competitors would have to make their own deal with the rightholders - so, they wouldn't necessarily get the same terms - but that's normal business practice. You gotta negotiate your own contract, not piggyback on a competitor's.
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Re: Exclusivity is the root of all evil in this.. (Score:3, Informative)
But with the exclusivity, you give Google a monopoly over out-of-print books.
We're talking about works that the publishers had decided to let die. The copyrights are still in force, but there are not enough sales to justify printing another copy. As a result, they are not currently available at any price.
The damage to both the consumers and authors took place when the books were taken off the market. As long as they are both out of print and still protected by copyright, without an agreement such as this, w
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The Modern Narrative (Score:3, Insightful)
There must always be some large, slow-moving body (like a Mammoth, but preferably evil like a corporation or government) which We The People assault to prove our virtue if not virility.
Yesterday, Microsoft and George W. Bush; today, Google and Nancy Pelosi. So it goes.
Aren't courts independents? (Score:2)
Isn't the judiciary branch supposed to be independent of executive?
Re:Aren't courts independents? (Score:4, Informative)
That's why it's a recommendation.
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They're not "stepping in", they're making a position statement on the matter. It's quite common and, on the whole, useful, because the judiciary is not generally an expert on an arbitrary matter.
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So if the jury members have iPhones and access google it is a problem [slashdot.org]. But government making a statement on case in progress is fine? I agree with geonik's post - in Europe it would be inconceivable.
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Amicus curiae is present in most common-law systems, including the UK. In France and Germany, at least, the courts are able to make requests for the opinions of third parties.
So if the jury members have iPhones and access google it is a problem
Yes, as it's a completely different situation. In this case, the opinion is provided to the court and could be presented to the jury if it meets judicial rules. If jury members simply look up information on their own on the Internet, there's no judicial vetting. (So, for example, a police organization could gather evidence illegally an
DOJ?? (Score:3, Insightful)
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That doesn't mean that *all* of their suggestions are bad. I distrust monopolies wherever they appear.
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"Is this the same DOJ that has been packed with "ex" Microsoft lawyers?"
Perhaps they just jumped ship to be on the winning team (i.e. the DOJ won, MS lost). DOJ lawyers moving to MS would be the suspicious scenario, not the other way around.
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Is this the same DOJ that has been packed with "ex" Microsoft lawyers?
You have to understand that lawyers are mercenary. They push the views of who ever is paying for their $3000 suits. That these guys once worked for Microsoft really doesn't say much, they work for the DoJ now so there's no telling who they are looking out for, but it isn't necessarily Microsoft.
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Not to mention all the RIAA cronies...
Who has been negative? (Score:2)
> The Google book deal has received considerable attention but
> for the most part it has been negative.
Surely most of the general public has viewed this Google project as a positive thing. Only large multinational corporations such as the large publishing houses, the RIAA [sic], Sony, and Microsoft (with their copyright and DRM interests) are the ones squeeling about Google making a fair-use amount of a book available for a reader to peruse.
Lets face it, MP3s make it easy for listeners to decide in a
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I think it's the exclusivity that bothers me. I don't particularly trust Google any more than Amazon and anyone else. Beyond that, I question the legitimacy of Google and a group that alleges to represent all authors cutting a deal. How is Google, at the end of the day, any more trustworthy a gatekeeper than Amazon, Microsoft or anyone else?
And I know a number of academics and authors have already called the deal into question as well, so its hardly just big multinationals.
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What is stopping other companies is that the current deal gives Google exclusive rights. What the objectors want is a non-exclusive arrangment.
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And this is precisely why the DoJ does not want the deal to go ahead. Worse, to my mind, than a natural monopoly, is a government (or in this case court) sanctioned monopoly. A considerable number of people, including, yes, other corporations, but also academics and librarians, are deeply concerned about this, and view Google's suddenly "opening up" to let other companies gain access as nothing more than a bandaid.
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But what's stopping other companies from making the same deal?
The fact that the settlement provides no mechanism for their doing so. The only reason Google got these terms is that they committed massive, commercial, copyright infringement and got sued. The group suing them managed to get their suit counted as a class-action, meaning that they got to represent anyone who didn't explicitly opt out. They then settled. Given that the minimum fine for wilful copyright infringement in the USA is $7,500 and the terms of the settlement amounted to a small fraction of this
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"Surely most of the general public has viewed this Google project as a positive thing."
I disagree (and stop calling me shirley)
renegotiation (Score:1)
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They can make deals with publishers, that is not a problem.
The problem is the case of "orphaned" (I'm not sure how strictly they are defining orphaned but other posts here imply it's not particularly strict) works, some body has through a class action sued Google on behalf of them. In a class action settlement the lawyers who brought the case essentially get to negotiate on behalf of the class and are trying to use this power to grant Google a settlement that lets them reproduce orphaned works.
The problem i