Grimmelmann on the Google Book Search Settlement
posted by Frank Pasquale
There has been a lot of intelligent commentary on the Google Book Search settlement from Siva Vaidhyanathan, Seth Finkelstein, Mike Madison, and Neil Netanel. Now James Grimmelmann has posted an extraordinarily thoughtful and incisive list of recommended revisions of and additions to the settlement. Grimmelmann focuses on the Registry that will be at the heart of the proposed arrangement between Google and the publishers:
[T]he Registry should be under ongoing antitrust scrutiny from the day of its birth. As a condition of settlement approval, the Registry should be required to negotiate and sign an antitrust consent decree with the Department of Justice. That decree would enumerate various forbidden anticompetitive practices—including those called out in the settlement, ones pertaining to hidden price-fixing (as in the example above), and whatever else the experts in the Antitrust Division think necessary to add. In addition, the Department would be given the ability to review any contracts entered into by the Registry and reject any with anticompetitive effect. . . . [Moreover,] any other entity willing to assume the same payment and security obligation that Google assumes in the settlement should be allowed to offer the same services that Google will.
Grimmelmann also develops consumer-protection, transparency, and open access standards for the proposed database. I’ll have some comments on it later on, but just wanted to post this link for now.
November 9, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Posted in: Google & Search Engines
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