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Google's ambitious plan to digitise entire libraries has met with legislative interest on both sides of the Atlantic. The Copyright Office in the US is challenging the settlement that Google reached with the Authors Guild and in the EU the Commission is launching a campaign to standardise authors' rights as a means of protecting them from any monopolistic threat from Google.
On October 7 there will be a hearing in a New York court on the settlement between Google and the Authors Guild. However Maybeth Peters of the US Copyright Office has said that the settlement would "alter the landscape of copyright law" and "bind authors, publishers and their heirs and successors to these rules, even though Google has not yet scanned and may never scan their works."
Google counters these arguments by saying that "the books that represent our cultural heritage should not be left behind in the digital age." Daniel Clancy, a Google engineer on the book project, went on to say: "We want other people to get into this business. One provider is better than none. But many is better than one." He denied that Google was bent on controlling e-publishing or seeking commercial advantage in the digital books business.
Whereas US threats to the Google digitising plan appear to major on copyright law, there is more than a hint in the EU of fears that the US may be achieving an educational advantage to the detriment of academics in the EU. There are currently 27 different sets of laws covering copyright in the EU and the commissioners launched a campaign for harmonisation early in September. They also asked: "Is the present framework still fit for the digital age? Will the current set of rules give consumers across Europe access to digitised books? Will it guarantee fair remuneration for authors? Will it ensure a level playing field for digitisation across Europe, or is there still too much fragmentation following national borders?"
The German and French governments have already expressed their concern about the Google scheme even though the company has already digitised more than 10 million books, including volumes from Oxford's Bodleian library, and across six other EU countries. Google has tried to counter these criticisms in Europe by offering representation on the Books Rights Registry - their new body helping to oversee the project. Another element is Europeana, a publicly funded parallel digitising project in the EU, which has itself already scanned more than 4 million books. |
