Does Richard Sarnoff Think the Google Settlement Is Anti-Competitive?
According to arstechnica, Richard Sarnoff, the chairman of the Association of American Publishers, in a public presentation at Princeton University, seems to have admitted that the Google Book Settlement is anti-competitive. The piece reports that …
Sarnoff said that the publishers he represents didn’t set out to create a monopoly in the markets for book search engines or online book sales. But he didn’t deny that the settlement could have that effect. After all, he noted, “copyright itself is a monopoly.”…
Sarnoff said that the structure of the registry will be “tough to replicate for [Google's] competitors.”
and, finally,
Sarnoff also speculated that … [l]egal hurdles may make it infeasible for any other firms to build a search engine comparable to Google Book Search.
Is the Settlement itself one of these legal hurdles?
Tags: settlement