March 27, 2011 by Jenna Newman
Jenna Newman is a graduate of the Master of Publishing program at Simon Fraser University.
The long-awaited ruling on the proposed Google Books settlement is out: the court has rejected the settlement. So many serious concerns were voiced by potential class members as well as scholars, librarians, the US Department of Justice, other nations—on questions of copyright, international law, class action validity, antitrust, privacy, and access—that it would have been surprising for the settlement to be approved as presented. In his opinion, Judge Denny Chin acknowledges many of the “troubling” issues in the settlement (James Grimmelmann and Kenneth Crews offer detailed reviews of the opinion), though Chin doesn’t rule specifically on each one.
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