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发帖数: 5516 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/technology/23google.html
Judge Rejects Google’s Deal to Digitize Books
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: March 22, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge in New York rejected Google’s $125 million
class-action settlement with authors and publishers, delivering a blow to
the company’s ambitious plan to build the world’s largest digital library
and bookstore.
The deal was rejected by Judge Denny Chin of United States District Court,
who said the deal went too far in granting Google rights to exploit books
without permission from copyright owners. Judge Chin also said that the
settlement would give Google a significant advantage over competitors in
digital books.
The court’s decision throws Google’s effort to digitize millions of books
from libraries into legal limbo and undoes years of painstaking negotiations
. The decision is also a setback for the Authors Guild and the Association
of American Publishers, which sued Google in 2005 over its digitizing plans
and later devised a sweeping settlement that would have helped to bring much
of the publishing industry into the digital age.
The deal would have allowed Google to make millions of out-of-print books
broadly available online and to sell access to them, while giving authors
and publishers new ways to earn money from digital copies of their works.
Yet the deal faced a tidal wave of opposition from Google rivals like Amazon
and Microsoft, as well as some academics, authors, legal scholars, states
and foreign governments. The Justice Department also opposed the deal,
fearing that it would give Google a monopoly over millions of so-called
orphan works, books whose right holders are unknown or cannot be found.
Despite a series of revisions to the deal made by Google and its partners
that were meant to address the most stinging critics, opponents remained
steadfast in their rejection of the settlement. |
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