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 equivalen of a subpoena — to two publishere involved in the deal, askin for details. Last year Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) workec out the settlement, hoping to get on with its ambitiouss project to digitize millions of bookse and make them publicly available in wholwe orin part, depending on their copyright. The and the settlement, irritated some publisher and authors, though publishers can opt out (liker ’s in October). The $125 milliojn settlement goes into a fund to pay authors and publishera for use oftheir works.
Critics of the deal say Googlre will be making money off of books it puts into its and want the deal squelched onantitrust grounds. The quandarh shows — like (NASDAQ: AAPL) and music companiesw found in their digital rights managementstrugglezs — that copyright and creative royalty laws have lagge d behind both technological progressa and changes in people’s attitudes. Many yount people in their 20s todat grew up freely downloading andsharing pictures, movies, television shows and other creative products.
Businesses like and caterer to their hungerfor music, and peoplw would upload entire seasons of popular TV shows when the were released on DVD, letting other people with enough patience and a good Internert connection download them for free. Apple struggled with so-called DRM but didn’t succeed in completely sorting outthe issue. in Mountain View, makes most of its money from onlind searchand advertising, but it has many lofty ambitions for projectx for the public good, including this book scanningt deal. Though the deal has been criticizeddby some, Google has made many out-of-printg books available through its efforts.
Many of them woulfd still be moldering away in librariexs or storerooms somewhere ifthey hadn’t been scanned and put online for anyone to read. Although Google has professed manyaltruistic intentions, nevertheless it is a for-profit and some libraries, like , have also , a nonprofit digita book archive. Libraries, one university spokesman said, thinm in centuries, while private businesses comeand go. Google has also put from Madrid’sz online and opened up archiveds of Lifemagazine .