Summary of judge's reasoning: 1. Class actions are meant to resolve past wrongs and not to do business deals affecting future rights of parties. 2. Therefore,

Summary of judge's reasoning: 1. Class actions are meant to resolve past wrongs and not to do business deals affecting future rights of parties. 2. Therefore, the best thing to do is take this issue to Congress, which ultimately has the constitutional power to fashion copyright rights and remedies. 3. It is quite unfair to give Google default rights to exploit all works ever written as to which the copyright holders are unknown. This is unfair to the authors and it is unfair to Google's competitors. 4. Opt-out might work well in a typical class action where an individual claim might amount to a few dollars. It would work a terrible miscarriage of justice, however, to say that each of the authors who fails to take affirmative steps to protect his copyright loses such rights to Google. 5. Unlike the typical class action, the objections made by class members were numerous, articulate, and strongly asserted. If the class members in whose name this action is supposedly brought have such strong feelings that it is unfair to them, that is a very bad indicator concerning the overall fairness of the settlement. My personal view: the judge here reacted strongly to the idea that a party such as Google could engage in mass copying of copyrighted works and then use the courts and the class action as vehicles by which to foist a forced, global licensing deal on the unwilling parties affected by its actions. The only way Google could swing this through this mechanism is if the court approved the opt-out procedure. Since most parties do not get notice at all, and most do not opt out, Google would get near-universal control of all published works by this method. By declaring that this would only be fair if an opt-in procedure is used, the judge effectively killed this as an effective mechanism for Google. This means that no one is bound by the terms unless that party takes proactive steps to become bound. By definition, then, the authors who do not receive notice, and all other cases where the copyright holders are unknown, will be excluded from the settlement and Google will get no rights to their works. This is a devastating blow to Google's book project. Unless it is overturned on appeal, it will be very hard to salvage this project (at least in anywhere near the form Google hopes) given this decision.