Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo! joined an alliance on Wednesday oppoing the legal settlement which would allow Google to digitise and sell millions of books in a move the Internet giant dismissed as "sour grapes".
The three technology heavy-weights are maong the members of a coalition called the Open Book Alliance which expressed concern about "serious legal, competitive, and policy issues" surrounding Google's book-scanning project.
In a statement, the alliance said its members, which include the nonprofit the Internet Archive, publishers and library associations, will counter the Google book settlement "in its current form".
Google reached a class action settlement in October of last year with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers to a copyright infringement suit they filed against the company in 2005.
Under the settlement, Google agreed to pay US$125 million (Bt4.3 billion) to resove outstanding claims and establish an independent "Book Rights Registry", which will provide revenue from sales and advertising to authors and publishers who agree to digitise their books.
Alliance co-chairs Peter Brantley and Gary Reback said in a blog post that the settlented monopoly and price fixing cartel".
Google, whose book project is already facing anti-trust scrutiny from the US Justice Department, a court review and privacy concerns, dismissed the move by the coalition.
"This sounds like the Sour Grapes Alliance," it said in a statement. "The Google Books settlement is injecting more competition into the digital books space, so it's understandable why our competitors might fight hard to prevent more competition."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment