Amazon: Google Books deal an ‘unprecedented’ copyright hack
Amazon came out swinging Tuesday against Google's proposed settlement with book authors and publishers. — Amazon's opposition was made public last week when it joined the Open Book Alliance, but the company filed its own brief …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's 2008 settlement with authors and publishers has been bleeding support for months: Harvard walked away from the scanning deal in November 2008 over the same terms, and this is not the first time a rival has used copyright law as a weapon — Microsoft ran the play with its 2007 attack on Google's book scanning while it still ran its own competing digitization program.
What changed Tuesday is that the opposition gained its most commercially threatened player yet. Amazon had already joined the Open Book Alliance last week; filing its own brief — calling the deal an 'unprecedented' copyright hack — moves the fight from a coalition statement to a formal objection aimed at the settlement itself. The pickup by BBC and GigaOM shows the story travelling beyond tech press into mainstream coverage of who controls library-scale digitization.
First-order effects
- The proposed settlement would hand Google commercial rights to millions of out-of-print books — a catalog advantage aimed squarely at Amazon's Kindle e-book business, which is why Amazon's own brief, not just its Open Book Alliance membership, matters.
- Authors and publishers backing the deal now face organized counterweight from Harvard's exit, the Open Book Alliance, and Amazon's filing, complicating approval of the settlement terms.
Second-order effects
- GigaOM's framing of Google 'colonizing' e-book devices points to the real battleground: if the settlement stands, Google gains a distribution channel to readers that bypasses the Kindle store, forcing Amazon and other device makers to fight through courts what they cannot fight through pricing.
- Rivals have now twice converted copyright objections into competitive strategy — Microsoft in 2007, Amazon in 2009 — normalizing legal opposition as the standard playbook against Google's digitization ambitions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, class-action settlements that grant one company sweeping commercial rights to a shared cultural corpus stop being routine legal endpoints and become contested policy fights, pulling regulators and libraries into adjudicating who may monetize orphaned works at scale.
- Digitization of library holdings drifts from single-company deals toward coalition-governed arrangements, since Harvard's departure and the Open Book Alliance demonstrate that even academic partners will defect when exclusivity concentrates too much power.
The trend: Big tech competitors are increasingly weaponizing copyright litigation and public-interest coalitions to check Google's drive to control large-scale book digitization.