A controversial back door deal with rights organizations to grant Google a monopoly on out of print books and works where the author "cannot be found" has been thwarted - for now.

Because of the huge amount of furor from authors, nations and others whose rights would be sold off for a pittance furthering Google’s goal of being sole arbiter of digital books the agreement must change. Due to that fact Judge Chin, presiding over the case, stated, "Under all the circumstances, it makes no sense to conduct a hearing on the fairness and reasonableness of the current settlement agreement, as it does not appear the current settlement will be the operative one."

Google’s goal is to become the only resource to out of print and lost author works as well as every other book ever printed. As with their other products, like adsense, the seller will never know what was paid for their work and the buyer will never know how much is paid an author. Google will be the sole resource for all digital books.

Google, for its part, has maintained it will allow others to purchase books to compete, but compete with the fact that first Google will make money then others. Authors can expect nothing and only the top 10 percent of those selling will ever see dollar one.

One of the problems is the wide sweeping deal, which covers works worldwide. It seems Google does not want to deal with countries it cannot deal with. In particular Germany and France who do not want their authors to be held up for profits by a gigantic monopoly whose main goal is money.

Another looming issue is what is Google going to do with all the money it earns displaying advertising while people search for books. Certainly authors will not see this money and these advertising revenues will be high as the searchers are looking for particular books which makes for easy advertiser profiling.

Google is trying to sell off the idea that this effort will benefit mankind making millions of works available to everyone. But putting such a monopoly of information into a private company whose agenda is commercial and whose profit margins will remain hidden is beyond pale. Google knows digital books and that information will be one of the few remaining valuable assets for the online world and it wants to control everything.

Imagine owning the rights every book in the world for a mere $125 million? There are obviously back office dealings to bring the corporate brotherhood backing on this. It is the world’s biggest rip-off for this century and we are lucky the greed of the French and German governments has stepped in to thwart the effort. We hope that the works get to see the light of day but under a free, open, democratically controlled venue and not a company who needs constant reminder “do no evil.”