Online book plans prompt EU copyright review
p2pnet news view Advertising | P2P:- In 2004 American advertising behemoth Google launched a project to gain virtually excusive control of the online world of books.
The plan was, and still is, to digitise libraries and literary works.
But from the beginning, people and institutions against the scheme have been demanding to know how a hardcore commercial company answerable only to shareholders and clients could be in sole charge what amounts to the world’s cultural heritage.
And the European Commission now says it may revise copyright law “to make it easier for companies like Google Inc. to scan printed books and distribute digital copies over the Internet,” says the Associated Press, going on: »»»
Under Europe’s current patchwork of copyright laws, rights are now managed separately in each of the European Union’s 27 nations, making it difficult to seek permission to republish or digitize content, especially when the rights holder is hard to find.
The European Commission said it would start work next year, with the goal of encouraging mass-scale digitization and suggesting ways for compensating copyright holders. Any suggested changes to European law would have to be approved by EU governments and lawmakers.
The commission said the move was partly triggered by a hearing it held in September where European authors, publishers, libraries and technology companies spoke out about how they would be affected by a deal Google is negotiating in the U.S.
Google has been scanning millions of books still under U.S. copyright. Under a tentative settlement with U.S. authors and publishers, that will cover all books unless the copyright holders object. A judge still needs to approve the settlement after the parties make changes to address U.S. Justice Department concerns. EU antitrust authorities are not examining it.
The European Commission, the EU executive, said that deal would create a situation where “the vast number of European works in U.S. libraries that have been digitized by Google would only be available to consumers and researchers in the U.S. but not in Europe itself.”
EU regulators want to study this year the impact of new rules on so-called orphan works — books in which the copyright holder can’t be traced or where copyright is unclear. One idea under consideration is having a manager stand in for authors who aren’t represented by the existing copyright agencies that collect and distribute royalties.
At the moment, Google is only scanning European books which are more 150 years old, “to avoid infringing copyrighted material,” says AP.
Said UK writer and broadcaster Bill Thompson in part, recently: »»»
The Department of Justice in the US has begun an investigation to see if it [the Google scheme] is anti-competitive, and last month a number of library associations got together with Amazon, Yahoo! and Microsoft to form the Open Book Alliance, which argues that it should not go forward.
The details of the settlement are complex, and it is almost impossible to be sure what would emerge from it because many of the provisions involve setting up things like a Book Rights Registry, and we don’t yet know what they will look like.
But whatever the detail there remains a fundamental problem.
It is not that the settlement will give Google indemnity from prosecution should it be found to have scanned books that are in copyright without the copyright owner’s position, nor even that it gives Google freedom to exploit scanned content commercially. It is, rather, that the settlement gives only Google these privileges, and places one company in a prime position to become the world’s de facto librarian instead of encouraging open access, open standards and a plurality of services and service providers.
Neither Google nor any other company should be entrusted with that responsibility, and nothing in the detail of the agreement or the funds that will be made available to authors as a consequence can change this. If Google is given a monopoly, either explicitly in the settlement or implicitly because any other scanning project would be forced to negotiate its own multi-million dollar agreement, then the deal must be rejected.
The proposed settlement came about after Google began a project to scan and index millions of books, including many that are still in copyright. It was sued by groups representing authors and publishers who felt that scanning books, even if the text was only used to create a searchable index which then pointed readers to the relevant text, was an unlicensed use and therefore illegal.
The book trade was also worried that Google might scan the books under the pretext of creating an index and then start offering them online or even selling them, even though it was always absolutely clear that such behaviour would be a breach of copyright.
Instead of fighting the case through the US courts and winning a great victory for those of us who believe that three hundred year-old notions of copyright should not be used arbitrarily to limit new ways of making use of creative works, Google announced in October 2008 that it had reached a settlement with the US Authors’ Guild and the Association of American Publishers that would allow it to continue scanning with permission.
At the moment the settlement hangs in the balance, waiting for what is quaintly termed a ‘fairness hearing’ in US District Court on October 7. At this hearing of the questions raised since the settlement was announced will be debated, including the question of how the relatively small Authors Guild came to speak for all published writers in the US, living and dead, in negotiating with Google.
Stay tuned.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Associated Press – Book scanning prompts review of EU copyright laws, October 23, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
