August 20th, 2009
MSFT, YHOO, AMZN join fight against Google Books
Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon will join the Internet Archive and library associations in opposing the Google Book deal, The New York Times reports. Says lawyer Gary Reback, who is advising the soon-to-be-announced Open Book Alliance:
This deal has enormous, far-reaching anticompetitive consequences that people are just beginning to wake up to.
The move is impressive in the size and importance of the companies, which will each file their own objections to settlement. The Archive’s Peter Brantley in an interview with the LA Times:
By having a set of organizations speaking together, we can demonstrate the seriousness which we all confront by the issues raised by the proposal. We are all united in our understanding of the core issues, such as its impact on competitiveness and the threat to reader privacy.
