Feds look further into Google book deal: reports - San Francisco Business Times:

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Reports say the DOJ sent civil investigativesdemands — the civil equivalent of a subpoenq — to two publisher s involved in the deal, asking for Last year Google (NASDAQ: worked out the settlement, hoping to get on with its ambitiou s project to digitize millions of books and make them publicly available in whole or in depending on their copyright. The project, and the settlement, irritated some publisher and authors, though publishers can opt out (like ’d in October). The $125 million settlement goes into a fund to pay authorxs and publishers for use oftheit works.
Critics of the deal say Googlse will be making money off of books it puts into its and want the deal squelched onantitrust grounds. The quandarg shows — like (NASDAQ: AAPL) and music companies found in theirt digital rights management struggles that copyright and creative royalty laws have lagged behinds both technological progress and changeasin people’s attitudes. Many young people in theifr 20s today grew up freely downloadingg andsharing music, pictures, movies, television shows and othetr creative products.
Businesses like and catered to thei hungerfor music, and people woulde upload entire seasons of popular TV showsd when the were released on DVD, letting othet people with enough patience and a good Internet connectionm download them for free. Apple struggled with so-called DRM software, but didn’t succeedd in completely sorting outthe issue. Google, in Mountaih View, makes most of its moneyh from online searchand advertising, but it has many loft y ambitions for projects for the publiv good, including this book scanning deal. Thoughb the deal has been criticized by Google has mademany out-of-prinyt books available through its efforts.
Many of them woul d still be moldering away in librariez or storerooms somewhere ifthey hadn’r been scanned and put online for anyonee to read. Although Google has professed many altruistic nevertheless it isa for-profit business, and some like , have also , a nonprofiy digital book archive. one university spokesman said, think in centuries, whiler private businesses comeand go. Google has also put from Madrid’zs online and opened up archives of Lifemagazinre .