Uncle Sam's Back Pages

The proposed settlement that has allowed Google to go forward with its ambitious Book Search project is being threatened with, of all things, an anti-trust investigation by the Justice Department: US Opens Inquiry Into Google Books Deal

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.

Geez, will we never be rid of "interest groups" with the word "Watch" in their names? I have used the Google Book Search and have found it to be amazing. You literally have the world's libraries at your fingertips. This is a boon for knowledge, and is especially a boon for the dissemination of out-of-print books and public domain works. If the government were doing this, there would be ribbon cuttings until the cows came home. But, because it is an entirely private initiative by a (shudder) publicly traded company, it is suspect. The "concerns" being raised are, frankly, pitiful:

The settlement, announced in October, gives Google the right to display the
books online and to profit from them by selling access to individual texts and
selling subscriptions to its entire collection to libraries and other
institutions. Revenue would be shared among Google, authors and publishers.

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.

"Orphan works" have been the cause of a lot of mischief in IP law. If I, or a relative, had written a book in the last 75 years, I would know about it. The idea that there are "millions" of such books that are still under copyright, but whose authors or rights holders can't be found is absurd. Why these sorts of phantom concerns would allow a landmark of education and technology to be turned upside down is beyond me, but it does serve as a reminder that America's government has adopted a fatal "can't do" spirit for anything that it does not want to understand.