San Francisco — Google Book Search archive continues to face opposition even as it managed to reach an amicable settlement last October with the Association of American Publishers and the Author’s Guild. Earlier this year, it was the that initiated an inquiry, which is still pending in the court, and now Google is being challenged by a trio of tech powerhouses in an attempt to stop the Internet search giant from moving forward with its Google Books project.
A coalition of firms that object to the Google Book Search settlement called the "Open Book Alliance," and the group now reportedly has the support of three Internet Goliaths, Namely: Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo, each with its own axe to grind with Google. Other groups include Internet Archive and Consumer Watchdog.
The trio are reportedly joining the Open Book Alliance in an attempt to stall the Google Books project, which enables users to search, view and purchase digitized books online. The Open Book Alliance says the Google Books project is anticompetitive, and that the Google Book Search settlement was an “insider deal”, the companies said last week.
Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo are clamping their alliance with a few library groups to protest the settlement, Peter Brantley, the Internet Archive’s director, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. The coalition, which is expected to be announced in a couple of weeks, will be co-led by antitrust lawyer Gary Reback, Brantley said.
"Yes, we have agreed to participate in the coalition," a spokesman for Microsoft said. A Yahoo spokeswoman said they had also signed on.
Amazon.com Inc has also reportedly joined, but a spokeswoman said: “We do not comment on rumor or speculation.
The tech giants, along with other members of the coalition, believe Google Books is anticompetitive and intends to voice their grievances independently with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Analysts say the covert deal gives Google the unobstructed authority to set prices for libraries, once they scan books and put them on the Internet. If the service becomes a necessity for libraries they would face monopoly pricing, Google’s opponents say.
They also warn that it would also empower Google — and only Google — to digitize so-called orphan works, which could pose an antitrust concern.
Google has been scanning the works from many major libraries, including the New York Public Library and the libraries at Stanford and Harvard universities, and makes those texts searchable on pages with advertisements. The Authors Guild, which commands over more than 8,000 authors, sued Google in September 2005, alleging that the company’s digitizing initiative amounted to “massive” copyright infringement. The suit was subsequently granted class action status.
“The Google Books settlement is administering more competition into the digital books space, so it is understandable why our competitors might fight hard to prevent more competition,” said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesperson. “That said, it is ironic that some of these complaints are coming from a company that abandoned its book digitization effort because it lacked a commercial intent.”
Stricker is pointing to Microsoft’s decision in May that it would end its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects, and wind down its digitization initiatives.
“Based on our experience, we envisage that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries,” Microsoft’s senior vice president of search, Satya Nadella, said during the May announcement. “With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content.”
According to the planned $125 million settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, announced in October 2008, if materializes, Google would have the right to show content from books online that are still in copyright but that are no longer in print. In addition, those copyright holders could be paid for online sales of their books.
Ironically, in an extraordinary reunion, the Silicon Valley lawyer Gary Reback, who spearheaded the industry opposition to Microsoft’s efforts to squeeze Netscape from the browser business, is the same attorney who is working with the alliance.
However, if the reports are true and uncompromising, then it would represent significantly more pushback against Google, which may have thought the major challenges to its goal of scanning and placing online millions of books from library collections — many of which are still under copyright — ended when it settled a suit with the two (then) main antagonists to its project.
A hearing on approval of the settlement is set for October 7 in U.S. District Court in New York.