AFP - Google and opponents and supporters of its digital book project have sparred in court as the judge hearing the case pressed the Internet titan about its plan to offer millions of books online.

US District Court Judge Denny Chin made it clear from the outset of the day-long hearing that he would not immediately rule on Google's complicated -- and controversial -- book-scanning agreement with US authors and publishers.

"To end the suspense, I am not going to rule today. There is just too much to digest," Chin said, reassuring lawyers in a packed Manhattan courtroom that he has an "open mind."

Those speaking against the deal outnumbered supporters by about four to one, with the judge allowing each of the more than two dozen individuals and groups five minutes to state their positions.

Supporters of the project argued that Google's proposed digital library and electronic bookstore would make millions of out-of-print books available and provide a new avenue for authors to profit from their works.

Despite privacy concerns the settlement offers "extraordinary benefits to our society," said John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology.

"The National Federation of the Blind strongly supports the proposed settlement," said its president, Marc Maurer

"Google will give us access to 10 million books," said Maurer, who was joined in court by dozens of other visually-impaired people.

Opponents urged the judge to reject the deal on anti-trust, copyright and privacy grounds and said it would give Google exclusive rights to digitize "orphan works" -- out-of-print books whose authors cannot be traced.

Others, including the Justice Department, criticized the legal settlement between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for including books unless an author expressly opts out of the deal.

The settlement resulted from a class action lawsuit filed in 2005 by the Authors Guild and AAP charging Google with copyright infringement.

It calls for Google to pay 125 million dollars to resolve outstanding claims and establish an independent "Book Rights Registry," which would provide a majority of sales and advertising revenue to authors and publishers.

Judge Chin at one point pointedly asked Daralyn Durie, an attorney for Google, whose company motto is "Don't be evil," whether she considered copyright infringement to be "evil."

Durie responded that Google's book project would compensate authors and provide otherwise unobtainable revenue to many whose works are out-of-print.

"There is no other way to create a market for these out-of-print works," she said. "In the absence of this settlement there is no way to access these works. They are locked away."

Tom Rubin, a Microsoft attorney, complained that "the settlement will give Google access to the entire corpus of unclaimed works" and Chin, in response to another lawyer, said "I think a lot of what this is about is the orphan books."

Google has dismissed the objections of Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo! and other rivals as "sour grapes" and said nothing is stopping them from digitizing books on their own.

William Cavanaugh, a Justice Department attorney, expressed copyright concerns about the agreement, the opt-out clause and a lack of clarity about Google's future business plans.

"What we have before us today is a series of forward-looking commercial transactions," Cavanaugh said, an argument the judge himself also pressed Google about at one point.

"Speculative harms are not a sufficient basis to reject a settlement," Google's Durie replied.

Cavanaugh said the department was still looking at anti-trust implications. "With respect to the anti-trust issues our investigation is ongoing," he said.

Online rights groups Electronic Frontier Foundation and Electronic Privacy Information Center each said the proposed settlement was a threat to people's privacy because Google would be able to track what they read.

"This settlement would create a library-book store with an unprecedented ability to track users' reading habits," said EFF attorney Cindy Cohn. "Google has said we should just trust them."

Google's Durie said the company recognized the need for strong privacy protections and has "a privacy policy in place."