settlement

In October 2009, the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) made national headlines when it proposed a record-setting $87 million penalty against BP Products North America Inc. for the company' failure to correct serious safety hazards at its Texas City, Texas refinery. Ten months later, OSHA announced that it reached a settlement with BP regarding some of those violations and penalties, with the firm agreeing to pay $50.6 million. It's not unusual for the penalty amounts proposed by OSHA to be reduced significantly to a figure eventually paid by the…
I promised you some updates on the Google Books Settlement, so here you go. Things are definitely getting interesting. First, I mentioned earlier that I was going to attend a panel on the Google Book Search Settlement here in DC, featuring representatives of Google, the publishers, and the Internet Archive. ITIF, which organized the panel, has made the entire thing available online; I've linked to it at the bottom of the post, because it's over an hour long. Anyway, it was interesting to hear the (very civil) differences of opinion between Dan Clancy, the Engineering Director for Google Book…
It's just not Google's week. A mob of angry villagers north of London formed human chains and chased off the Google Maps car (no word whether they had torches). Microsoft is all up in Google's business (to be precise, they're funding a team at New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, led by a former Microsoft programmer, which is weighing in on the pending settlement of Google's book-scanning lawsuit). And it's not just Microsoft that's taking aim at Google: the NYT has an overview of the many parties, from librarians to law professors, who have serious doubts about…