Eileen McDermott, New York
The US Department of Justice said last month that the November amended settlement agreement (ASA) in the Google Book Search case remains "a bridge too far".
In a statement filed with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the DOJ responded to the amended book digitisation deal announced last year by Google, the Authors' Guild and the Association of American Publishers.
That agreement included revisions based on the Department's September amicus brief in which the antitrust watchdog raised a number of copyright and competition law concerns about the original proposed settlement.
The lawsuit centres on the 2004 Google Library Project, in which Google agreed with various libraries to digitise books in their collections, including many rare and out of print works as well as so-called orphan works whose copyright owner cannot be identified.
The project prompted authors and publishers to bring a...