Google and the DOJ

The U.S. Justice Department has criticized the Google Book Settlement, saying that the proposals still present copyright and antitrust issues. In particular, it is concerned that the settlement in its current form forces authors

to "opt out" of having their books scanned and digitised, rather than opting in, which is the usual assumption for copyright law.  (Telegraph)

Heavyweights join opposition to Google Book Settlement

The Google Book Settlement will go before a U.S. district court on October 7 this year, and Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo! have all announced that they will join efforts to block the Book Rights Registry. The Register reports that

Amazon's Jeff Bezos is on record as saying about the proposed deal: "Clearly, that settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited and it is being revisited... it doesn't seem right that you should do something, kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights."

The battle lines are clear. Authors see the Registry as a way to gain even a meager amount of cash from their work, and Google's competitors see the settlement as cementing an intellectual Googleopoly.

The European Union is also to hold a hearing September 7, "to gather input on how the deal might affect European authors."

Google Books antitrust probe to go ahead

Google's $125,000,000 book-scanning settlement is to be investigated by U.S. antitrust legislators, according to Bloomberg. The Register reports that

deputy attorney general William F. Cavanaugh sent a letter to the federal judge overseeing the proposed settlement, saying that the deal may run afoul of US antitrust laws. "The United States has reviewed public comments expressing concern that aspects of the settlement agreement may violate the Sherman Act," Cavanaugh wrote.

At the centre of the probe will be the issue of the so-called "orphan works" - books whose rights are controlled by authors and publishers who have ceased to exist or cannot otherwise be located.

Google Book Settlement Website

It may be of interest to point out that the Google Book Settlement website has detailed information about the settlement agreement, and also online and downloadable claim forms. N.B. the UK's ALCS (Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society) has published a warning about third-party phishing operations that may target users of the site.

From the FAQ:

I am not a United States citizen, or I live outside of the United States. Am I included in this Settlement?

Yes, most likely you are. If you are a citizen of another country or live in another country, you are likely to own a U.S. copyright interest if:

Your Book was published in the United States;
Your Book was not published in the United States, but your country has copyright relations with the United States because it is a member of the Berne Convention; or
Your country had copyright relations with the United States at the time of the Book’s publication.

You should assume that you own a U.S. copyright interest in your Book, unless you are certain that your Book was published in, and that you reside and are located in, one of the few countries that have not had or do not now have copyright relations with the United States. The Copyright Office has published a list of countries with which the United States has copyright relations, available at www.copyright.gov/circs/circ38a.pdf. If you have further questions about whether you own a U.S. copyright interest in your Book or Insert, you can contact Class Counsel, who are the attorneys representing the Settlement Class. Their names and contact information are on the Notice. You may also seek advice from an attorney or a rights organization in your country.

P.S. The Irish Times has quite an interesting article on the whole issue here.

Google Book Settlement - the saga continues

According to Dagens Nyheter journalist Juan Flores, who seems to be the man on the case for that particular Swedish daily, Bonnier has become the first large publishing house in Sweden to dispute the Google arrangement. Bonnier's company lawyer, Dag Wetterberg, will be quite busy right now, as Google has evidently scanned some 60,000 titles by Bonnier authors, and in 6,000 of these cases the whole book has been scanned. Bonnier is being offered a lump sum of a million Swedish kronor (i.e. about €100,000, slightly less in sterling) for this monumental control of titles, which Bonnier thinks is far too little money for far too much long-term power.

It would seem to outsiders like me that this is becoming a rather hubristic exercise on the part of Google. It also looks as if Google has been scanning thousands, maybe millions of books, if we extrapolate from the Bonnier case, on the sneak, hoping that they will be able to do something with these scans that will afford Google a profit. According to the Bonnier lawyer, Google seem to have been scanning away at U.S. universities that have Swedish departments (well, no problem in the UK, there aren't many...), and this could mean that every Swedish book bought by these universities before the beginning of 2009 can end up on a Google data base.

The Bonnier lawyer does not appear to be a Luddite, merely wondering who is going to profit from all this. Obviously, it is a great boon for books to be scanned, should the originals be destroyed by accident or war. But I hope that European publishing houses will wake up to what is going on, before they find out that, by doing nothing, they have signed up to wholesale control of their publications by Google.

The other large Swedish publishing house, Norstedts, has not yet come to a decision as to how to tackle this issue.

I do get the feeling that this whole issue has been handled badly by the various players, leading to a situation where publishing houses worldwide are suddenly finding themselves in an opt-out position, never an enviable one to be in.

Google Books and the EU

Dagens Nyheter's Juan Flores has taken up the question of the Google book digitization project, reporting that Germany intends to raise the matter at next week's meeting of EU ministers of culture. Attitudes among EU members differ, though. As Eric pointed out in the comments:

"the German publishers' association was critical of Google; the Swedish publishers' association sat on the fence, leaving it to individuals to decide for themselves."

See also in this blog: Orphans and Foundlings