SAN FRANCISCO - A US federal judge last week curtailed Google's ambitions to create a giant digital bookstore and library, and Google and groups representing publishers and authors have since been assessing their options.

Their original settlement would have let Google scan and make available every book ever published, but the judge, Denny Chin, rejected it March 22.

After seven years, Google may take the battle from the courtroom to Congress, to promote a law that would make orphan works - books that are still under copyright but whose author or copyright owner can't be found - widely available.

"The publishers have said, 'We want to settle,' but Google's motivation to settle is quite a bit lower," said Pamela Samuelson, an expert in digital copyright law at the University of California, Berkeley, who opposed the settlement. Google has already scanned 15 million books.

Publishers and authors have several choices besides appealing the ruling. They could drop or revive their original copyright lawsuit against Google, which claimed that even Google's more modest initial plan to scan books and show snippets of their text was illegal. Those issues have never been litigated.

Another option, which publishers and authors said was attractive, would be to reach a new settlement with Google that requires each author or copyright owner to opt in and permit Google to digitize their works.

But the company already allows publishers to join with Google to show more of their digitized works. The point of the original settlement was to automatically opt in vast quantities of books.

The New York Times