The Bodleian Library at Oxford University, above, is working with Google to digitize its books.
BERLIN — Opposition is mounting in Europe to a proposed class-action settlement giving Google the right to commercialize digital copies of millions of books.
The settlement would permit Americans to buy online access to millions of books by European authors whose works were scanned by Google at American libraries.
While some big European publishers, like the Oxford University Press and Bertelsmann (which owns Random House) and Georg von Holtzbrinck (the owner of Macmillan), support the agreement, there is widespread opposition among French publishers. The German government, supported by national collection societies in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Spain, plans to argue against it and encourage writers to pull out of the agreement.
A United States District Court has set a Sept. 4 deadline for submissions on the settlement and plans to hold a hearing Oct. 7.
Akash Sachdeva, an intellectual property lawyer with the law firm Allen & Overy in London, said that last-minute objections from Europe were unlikely to stop the settlement from going forward.
“I would imagine the court is going to say that because you have a significant amount of big players around the world who have opted into this, then it is worth proceeding with,” he said.
Google, which has been digitizing books since 2004 to make them available online, says the proposed settlement will benefit publishers, authors and consumers, making a vast reservoir of work available for easy access.
Around the world, 25,000 publishers, libraries and individuals are working with Google to digitize their archives and catalogues, including Oxford’s prestigious Bodleian Library and the Bavarian State Library. Even the French National Library, an outspoken opponent of the project, said last week that it was talking to Google about a deal to help digitize its archives.
“We believe that we are helping the industry tremendously by creating a way for authors and publishers to be found,” said Santiago de la Mora, Google’s head of printing partnerships in London. “Search is critical. If you are not found, the rest cannot follow.”
Mr. de la Mora also said that authors could always remove their works from Google’s scanning registry.
The European Commission is to hold a staff-level meeting on the proposed settlement on Sept. 7, but it has not directly involved itself in the case. The commission has supported homegrown digitization projects, including the Europeana online book and cultural library database.
In Britain, where many publishing houses have close ties to the United States, publishers have avoided open confrontation with Google.
But some British publishers have objections and are working with Google on issues like how to determine whether a book is out of print, which comes up when books are still widely available in Europe but no longer in the United States.
Some are also concerned about a lack of European representation on the Book Rights Registry, a panel that is supposed to collect and distribute revenue from Google’s book sales in the United States to authors and publishers.
In Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Spain, opposition to the settlement is more vocal.
The German government has hired an American law firm, Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, to submit a friend-of-the-court brief opposing Google.
Copyright agencies in the opposing countries, which represent publishers and authors and generate revenue by levying fees on their book sales, view Google’s online sales platform as a direct threat.
Four European agencies, VG Wort of Germany, Literar Mechana of Austria, Pro Litteris of Switzerland and Cedro of Spain, are asking members to remove their books from Google’s online registry, should the settlement be approved.
In Germany, about 2,700 people, including the prominent authors Günter Grass and Daniel Kehlman, have signed a petition asking the government to try to scuttle the settlement. Alain Kouck, the chief executive of Editis, the second-largest French book publisher, said he was talking to other publishers about developing a unified French digital sales platform.
No comments:
Post a Comment