My crazy-long blog post about the Google Book Search settlement has now completed its transformation into “real” article. The result is “How to Fix the Google Book Search Settlement,” which you can read either in the April issue of the Journal of Internet Law (subscriptions just $488 a year!) or here in PDF. It’s a little less playful and a little more polished than the original blog post, but it’s substantively mostly the same ideas. Here’s the abstract:
The proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case should be approved with strings attached. The project will be immensely good for society, and the proposed deal is a fair one for Google, for authors, and for publishers. The public interest demands, however, that the settlement be modified first. It creates two new entities—the Books Rights Registry Leviathan and the Google Book Search Behemoth—with dangerously concentrated power over the publishing industry. Left unchecked, they could trample on consumers in any number of ways. We the public have a right to demand that those entities be subject to healthy, pro-competitive oversight, and so we should.