September 2009
Google Books – EU Chapter
Google has hit yet more hurdles as it attempts to become the digital librarian of the world, this time from the EU.
At a hearing with the European Commission, Google announced that it would exclude all European books that are still “commercially available” on the EU market from its US Book Settlement. This means that European books which are no longer available on the U.S. market but are available on the EU market will only be digitised on Google Books if authors of such books expressly agree for Google to do so.
It also confirmed that it would appoint two European representatives to sit on the independent rights group overseeing Google Books in order to reflect the rights and interests of European Authors and Publishers.
The announcement was welcomed as a step in the right direction but falls short of the demands of most European publishers and authors who feel that they have not been given an adequate opportunity to contribute to a settlement which has a potential to substantially undermine their legal rights and adversely affect the way they deal with their catalogue of works.
In addition representatives of the French and German governments have filed formal objections to the Google Books U.S. settlement alleging that Google’s actions are in breach of their copyright laws and displaying clear discontent to the prospect of Google acting as exclusive licensee of a substantial collection of European cultural works.
Their objections as well as those of rival companies Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon have been filed with a Manhattan court in which a fairness hearing has been set to take place next month (October 7th 2009) to decide the fate of the Google Book settlement.
Background
The infamous US Google Book Settlement was reached in November 2008 as a result of a class action lawsuit based on copyright infringement brought by parties including the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild.
As part of the settlement Google agreed to set up an independent Books Rights Registry composed of American authors and publishers and contribute a sum of $125 million to it to distribute to any outstanding copyright claims.
This enabled Google to digitise out-of print and orphan books unless the Author of such books expressly opted out, in effect granting a compulsory licence of all such books in the U.S. to Google.
Publishers and authors opting in to the agreement would be paid a percentage of revenue generated by sales and advertising via the Books Rights Registry (Google get around 37%).
BRIFFA comment
Google has reportedly digitised around 10 million out-of print/orphan books and was clearly aware that it was in breach of copyright law when doing so. However as with most of its projects Google has such a large amount of money and influence in the digital world that in its opinion it makes better commercial sense for it to go ahead with such projects and worry about the legal implications after. Take for second example its Google AdWords project.
The settlement reached in the U.S though now under threat itself is a lot more straightforward then any it proposes to reach with the European community. This is because of the simple fact that there is no EU wide copyright law in place and Google would in turn have to deal with separate territorial copyright laws.
A statement issued by members of the European Commission at Mondays hearing apart from advocating its commitment to ensuring that copyright laws in the EU are respected acknowledged that there is still too much fragmentation of copyright laws across the EU which needs to be addressed and updated to reflect the digital age.
In turn the Google books matter has at the very least yet again prompted the EU to push forward with its prolonged aspirations to harmonise and modernise EU copyright law.
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