Google Book Search Under Antitrust Scrutiny

It wasn't really a surprising announcement, but the Department of Justice is officially investigating the settlement agreement Google struck with the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers over Google Books.

What's the big deal? The settlement is an agreement designed to let publishers, authors, and Google profit from works in Google Books. So far, so good. The sticking point is what happens with "orphan works." These are books that are no longer in print but still have a copyright. Under this agreement, Google assumes those books should be available in full unless rights holders say otherwise.

They've set up a group to try and find the rights holders and pay them their share of any future revenues, but there are probably plenty of orphan works that will remain ownerless, and opponents argue that this gives Google an unfair advantage when it comes to publishing rights.

Google argues that their agreement is non-exclusive, so other publishers are free to enter into agreements of their own. That wasn't an argument that held water when they tried it with the Yahoo! AdSense deal, so I'm not sure how well it will work in this case.