The Google Book Settlement (Amended Settlement Agreement) has been rejected.

Since, as you may know, the GBS ate puppies and was directly and singly responsible for Anthropogenic Global Warming, this is a good thing. The world is safe for puppies. (Like the puppy above, which comes to you from the George Eastman House collection and is understood to be free of copyright restrictions.)

In its spare time, the GBS was a brilliant and complex attempt to get around copyright legislation through the US class action system. Since each time the US congress meets to deliberate on copyright reform the code gets longer and favours Mickey Mouse even more, and since what Google wanted to achieve amounted to a huge loosening of the code, that makes sense. Unfortunately, the GBS was also a disaster zone for IP and an attempt to make new law without reference to US lawmakers. In fact, the reasons I and others hated it pretty much crop up one after another in Judge Chin's zinging judgment. It's not a lightweight slap on the wrist. It's more of an asteroid dropping on the GBS from space.

The issues the GBS has raised about our copyright system, however, won't lie down just yet. The Hargreaves Commission is deliberating, and - as with any number of commissions we've seen recently - the devil is in the terms of reference. The strong presumption appears to be that copyright is broken. That may be true to a point, but the more I look at it, the more I suspect much of what ails it could be best solved not by new legislation but by a more alert and helpful licensing culture. For my last post here at Futurebook, I wanted to use an image by a sculptor which was sent to me by a collective he had been a part of in response to my request on Twitter for a usable picture of a book which had been physically remodelled. With everyone wanting to make it happen and no question of money being paid and so on, the whole thing took two days - hardly close to the blogging timeframe. And yet if it was common practice to include with an image an understanding of how it may and may not be reused, we'd have been away.

More later - but for now, a word of caution: a wise man pointed out to me when I first started to object to this that the technological side is utterly irrelevant to the legal one. That this is a digital issue does not make any difference. And in the legal world, when you lose, you dust yourself off and get set to start litigating again. No doubt we'll hear more about this soon.