As Michael Cader aptly put it in his Publisher’s Lunch newsletter yesterday, “in the publishing world, this is the closest thing we will have to the Olympics,” coming after “years of training, preparation, and negotiation”: the final installment in the Google Books Settlement case. According to a CNet News report by Greg Sandoval, the hearing cranked up again yesterday with Judge Denny Chin declaring, “I’m going to say right off, I’m not going to rule today. I’m going to listen to opinions carefully and I’m going to ask a few questions.”

He spent the afternoon listening to testimony from some of the 30 or so parties scheduled to testify, including Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amazon, the National Federation of the Blind, and the Center for Democracy and Technology. Cader’s report added: “the only flag flying in the courtroom is America’s, but the teams came from all over–France, Germany, Japan and Connecticut; the National Federation for the Blind, who brought such a large contingent that Judge Chin quipped ‘many of whom are here this morning apparently’ (to which their president replied, ‘It’s very important to us your honor.’); the corporate nation states of Sony, Amazon, Microsoft, AT&T; and more.” And an Associated Press wire story says there was even “a lawyer for folk singer Arlo Guthrie and ‘Pay it Forward’ writer Catherine Ryan Hyde,” who “claimed the [Google] library would exploit his clients” and that the settlement offers “woefully inadequate compensation” for “unknown and undisclosed uses.”

As to what kind of testimony transpired, CNet says Chin “interrupted an attorney testifying for Microsoft by pressing him on why Sony, a competitor, is all right with the proposed settlement, but Microsoft isn’t.”The AP report says a representative of the Children’s Book Guild said of the reference to Google’s “library,” that “It’s not going to be a great library, it’s going to be a great store.”

And the perhaps most important testimony of them all came from the Department of Justice. According to a Publishers Weekly report by Andrew Albanese,

U.S. attorney William Cavanaugh slammed the Google settlement, telling Judge Denny Chin that the class action vehicle was inappropriate, and that the settlement “turned copyright on its head.” Though the settlement may or may not offer tangible benefits, the U.S. attorney stressed, “procedural rules cannot be used to modify rights.” He also told the judge that the Department of Justice has an active, “ongoing antitrust investigation” open on the settlement, suggesting that if the judge does approve the deal, DoJ intervention still could be a factor.

At issue, Cavanaugh said, is the settlement’s “grafting on” of a sweeping, forward-looking business model in a deal that was to decide whether Google’s “copying and snippeting” was fair use. “Either litigate the case as presented,” Cavanaugh stated flatly, or “settle the case as presented.” Cavanaugh noted that no one appointed the parties to be their “agents” in this matter, and even stated that making the settlement opt-in would not necessarily solve the government’s issues with the case.

At day’s end, according to PW, “Chin was hard to read, beyond moments of clear impatience when arguments were repeated or did not address the specific issues of the settlement. He did seem to internalize the questions raised by objectors engaging in a Q&A with [Google attorney Michael] Boni for example, while hardly interrupting Cavanaugh. But at the end of the hearing, he offered only that he had been given a lot to think about.”