Skip to Content

DOJ: Court should reject Google book search settlement

The U.S. Department of Justice has come out against the proposed agreement to settle copyright lawsuits that authors and major publishers filed against Google over the search company’s book search program.

"This Court should reject the Proposed Settlement in its current form and encourage the parties to continue negotiations," reads a filing the DOJ submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late on Friday.

The proposed settlement must be modified by Google and the plaintiffs so that it complies with U.S. copyright and antitrust laws, the DOJ said in its filing, a 32-page Statement of Interest.

Meanwhile, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) came out in favor of the deal, saying the new book search services will be "extraordinarily valuable, and will make available to the public a vast amount of knowledge and information that is largely inaccessible today." The CDT tempered its endorsement by stating that the new services create "serious privacy concerns" and that the court should take "affirmative action" during the settlement process to make sure reader privacy is protected.