Washington: Google Inc argued in a staunch and sometimes eloquent brief that an agreement that it had reached with the Authors Guild to digitize thousands of books was legal and a contribution to human knowledge.
Google's plan to put millions of books online has been praised for expanding access to books but the Justice Department criticised it on February 4 on a variety of grounds, saying it potentially violated antitrust and copyright laws.
Google disagreed, saying on Thursday that the amended settlement agreement complies with the law. "The benefits of approval are bounded only by the limits of human creativity and imagination. The costs of disapproval are equally large," the company said in a court filing.
The search engine giant also argued that the deal did not harm libraries or other groups seeking to digitize books but that it would make millions of out-of-print books available to the public, which is "precisely the kind of beneficial innovation that the antitrust laws are intended to encourage."
Google also took a swing at corporate rivals.
"Competitors such as Amazon raise anxieties about Google's potential market position, but ignore their own entrenched market dominance," Google said in its brief.
U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, who must approve the class action suit for it to go into effect, has scheduled a hearing on the settlement for Feb. 18.
The agreement is designed to settle a 2005 class action lawsuit filed against Google by authors and publishers who had accused the search engine giant of copyright infringement for scanning collections of books from four universities and the New York Public Library.
The Justice Department recommended in September that the agreement be rejected.
Faced with this and other opposition, Google and a group of authors and publishers made a series of changes to the deal in November that has failed to stem criticism of it.
Critics have been a varied group that includes Yahoo Inc, Microsoft Inc, the National Writers Union and Consumer Watchdog.
Libraries have not opposed it outright but are wary. In mid-December, three library associations stopped short of seeking to halt to Google's digital books plan, but asked for Justice Department oversight to prevent an excessively high price for institutional subscriptions.
Comments
0 comment