Heavyweights join opposition to Google Book Settlement

The Google Book Settlement will go before a U.S. district court on October 7 this year, and Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo! have all announced that they will join efforts to block the Book Rights Registry. The Register reports that

Amazon's Jeff Bezos is on record as saying about the proposed deal: "Clearly, that settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited and it is being revisited... it doesn't seem right that you should do something, kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights."

The battle lines are clear. Authors see the Registry as a way to gain even a meager amount of cash from their work, and Google's competitors see the settlement as cementing an intellectual Googleopoly.

The European Union is also to hold a hearing September 7, "to gather input on how the deal might affect European authors."