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Post an EU jobThe European Commission is to hold a hearing in September for interested parties to comment on the impact on EU writers' rights of a deal struck with publishers by Google to make millions of books available online.
In a deal with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers in October 2008, Google agreed to pay $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers can register works and be compensated by institutional subscriptions or book sales. The US Justice Department is now looking into this settlement.
Last autumn, the EU launched its own Internet library, 'Europeana', giving access to hundreds of thousands of books, many of which are rare or out-of-print altogether. The portal, which hosts some two million 'digitised objects' from all 27 member states contributed by around 1,000 cultural institutions, initially collapsed amid massive interest and millions of hits, but has functioned normally since December 2008 (EurActiv 21/11/08).
LinksDossier: Copyright protection of online content
Oliver Drewes, Commission spokesman for the internal market, confirmed that Brussels had sent out invitations for the hearing, which is due to take place on 7 September.
The development follows a complaint by Germany, backed by Britain and France, that Google had scanned books from US libraries to create its Google Books database without the prior consent of rights holders. EU ministers discussed the issue at the end of May (EurActiv 27/05/09).
EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding, who looks poised to be re-appointed for a second consecutive mandate in her current role and is set to win control of the Google Books dossier (EurActiv 23/06/09), underlined the need to modernise EU copyright rules on libraries.
"We should create a modern set of European rules that encourage the digitisation of books," she said
at a July conference in Brussels. "More than 90% of books in Europe's national libraries are no longer commercially available, because they are either out of print or orphan works."
"The creation of a Europe-wide public registry for such works could stimulate private investment in digitisation, while ensuring that authors get fair remuneration also in the digital world," she said.
"This would also help to end the present, rather ideological debate about Google Books. I do understand the fears of many publishers and libraries facing the market power of Google. But I also share the frustrations of many Internet companies which would like to offer interesting business models in this field, but cannot do so because of the fragmented regulatory system in Europe," Reding added.
Google Book Search allows users to view books or extracts of millions of books online after having conducted a keyword-based search. Seven million titles were covered by the service as of April 2009, and the database is expected to continue to grow as time goes by.
Books digitised by the service include titles available in the public domain, copyrighted material reproduced with the permission of the rights holder, and out-of-print works.
Rights holders who do not want their works included in the project must contact Google themselves to opt-out of it, while Google itself employs a variety of security measures to protect copyrighted material, primarily by limiting the number of viewable pages.
(EurActiv with Reuters.)
(9 July 2009)
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