Please Refine Your Search Terms - Inside Higher Ed

From Inside Higher Ed:

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and a notable Google gadfly, said the company overplayed its hand by essentially trying to rewrite the rules governing the copying and distribution of book content through a class-action settlement. "Google clearly flew too close to the sun on this one," he wrote in an e-mail. "...This is not what class-action suits and settlements are supposed to do."

Vaidhyanathan said that Google now faces the choice of either continuing to fight for its interpretation of copyright law in the courts or scaling back its plans for a digital bookstore. "If Google decides to take the modest way out, it can still ask Congress to make the needed changes to copyright law that would let Google and other companies and libraries compete to provide the best information to the most people," the media scholar says. "Congress should have been the place to start this in the first place."