The judge who is overseeing a lawsuit by book authors and publishers against Google has told the parties to file a revised settlement agreement by next month.

An earlier agreement to settle the four-year-old lawsuit brought against Google by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers was shelved last month after the U.S. Department of Justice expressed concerns. That pact would have allowed Google to digitize and sell books, including "orphan works" -- out-of-print books that are under copyright but whose owners can't be found. The agreement also called for Google to fund a new book rights registry, similar to the music industry's ASCAP and BMI, and would have allowed the registry and Google to set prices for digital books.

The DOJ, and some outside advocacy groups like Public Knowledge, said that the deal was problematic because it could give Google an advantage over other potential publishers of orphan works. Any other company that publishes orphan works risks copyright liability, which can run as high as $150,000 per infringement.

After the DOJ said it wanted to see the deal revised, Google, the Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers asked U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin in New York for additional time to hammer out new terms. On Wednesday, Chin told them to file the amended agreement by Nov. 9.

Separately, digital rights advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU objected to the deal on the grounds that Google had not guaranteed to preserve readers' privacy. They argued that the deal should not go forward without assurances from Google that it will guarantee readers the same privacy and anonymity that patrons of brick-and-mortar libraries have.

This week, the digital rights groups, along with a coalition of authors and other interested parties, asked Google to revise the settlement by including "enforceable privacy protections."

Last month, Google posted a privacy policy specific to the book settlement. In that document, the company promised to protect people's First Amendment right to read anonymously, and to limit the information that is available to credit card companies. But advocates say that privacy protections should be built into the settlement agreement.

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