Denny Chin, the judge in the Authors Guild versus Google Books case, seems to be getting more and more frustrated the longer this six-year-old case drags on. In the latest hearing on the matter today, he set a firm deadline of September 15th for all parties involved to come up with a new settlement.

Judge Chin had rejected the much-vaunted $125 million previous settlement back in March, feeling that it gave too much power to Google. He expressed the opinion that an opt-in system, in which authors and publishers explicitly had to allow their books to be made available, would be preferable over the opt-out system Google had previously proposed.

After the hearing, a Google spokesman said that the company was looking into “a number of options” to comply with the judge’s suggestions, and an Authors Guild lawyer said they were working toward an opt-in settlement.

If both parties have not come up with a settlement by the September deadline, the judge will set a “relatively tight schedule” to move the case forward to trial. Lest we forget, in six years of legal wrangling, the case has never managed to move past preliminary hearings and settlement talks. It’s hard to blame Judge Chin for starting to get a little impatient.

Still, it’s a little sad to see the opt-out option, which would have made orphan works available by default, go out the window. One of the parts of the original settlement that most appealed to me is that it would have meant vanished rights-holders would no longer default to being dogs in the manger.

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