Back in March of 2011, Circuit Court Judge Denny Chin rejected a settlement between the Authors’ Guild and Google on anti-trust grounds, stating that it would create a monopoly. The major objections were unfair advantage, privacy abuse, undermining copyright protection, and exerting unfair impact on competition. The decision was good for authors, who tend to be not well organized, in that Google's proposal called for authors to opt - out of their scheme or be considered as willing participants. Chin suggested opting - in would be fairer. In that way authors who do not make a choice are not automatically swept along into the system.

Those who objected were primarily authors, international entities (whose international copyright laws would have been ignored), competitors, and idealists who think intellectual property should receive more protection. One especially problematic area for Judge Chin was that of orphan books - that is books which are under copyright but for whom the author is not known. According to the Google Settlement, Google would have simply digitized and distributed these books, eliminating competition and thereby changing copyright law.

To date Google has scanned 20 million books, some illegally and some legally. The project originated when Google formed a partnership with several research libraries – University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library – to scan books in what it termed its Library Project. The scanning did not include complete books still in copyright; often pages were blacked out; and normally just snippets from books were made available for evaluation to the public. Google claims their methods use “no more than necessary” for a reader to get the idea of whether a book would be valuable. And the company likens their method of perusal to that of Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book,” a