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Quick Note: Legal webinar on the Google Book Settlement
December 2, 2009 | 8:39 pm
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By Paul Biba
On December 4 at Noon PST Law Seminars International will be holding a one hour webinar on the Settlement. The program will cover an overview of the settlement, implications for copyright law, antitrust aspects of the case, class action issues and international implications. CLE credit is available. Speakers will come from Vanderbilt University law School and three law firms. Tuition is $125. As a lawyer I am quite interested in hearing what the legal experts have to say. You can find the details here.
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Comments:
$125 for one hour?
I see Google isn’t the only one profiteering on its book scanning operation.
The implication of the settlement for copyright law is quite simple. If you’re a $28 billion corporation with a media relations department clever enough to dupe the press with bogus claims, copyright law no longer exists. The only exceptions are European countries whose governments seem to have enough backbone to fight this, hence the exclusion of non-English-speaking countries from the revised settlement.
Of course, it also helps to have given about six times more to the Obama campaign than anyone else in Silicon Valley. That may explain why the judge rejected Amazon’s recent efforts to slow down this legal steamroller. The formal announcement of the judge’s promotion to the Second Circuit Appeals Court came the day before he issued his most important ruling thus far in favor of the settlement. A more cautious judge would regard that as reason enough to recuse himself from the case.
Of course, even as a writer I have to admit that this pales into insignificance in comparison to Google’s cooperation with the Chinese government’s efforts to censor the Internet. Even at the height of its power, with German troops standing watch from the Arctic Ocean to North Africa, Nazi Propaganda Minister Gobbels was only censoring the news to a bit over 200 million people. Each day, Google quite calmly censors the news available to 1.2 billion people, six times as many.