Brussels, 07/09/2009 (Agence Europe) - Authors, publishers and civil servants met in Brussels on Monday 7 September to discuss the implications of the “Google books affair” for copyright and royalties in the European Union. According to the settlement currently being studied by US justice system, Google proposes putting every work written in the United States online in a digital format. In Europe, some see a threat to authors' royalties, and even to our cultural heritage, while others see it as an example to follow to ensure public access to written works in the digital age. The hearing was organised following a request at the Competitive Council by Germany and France, concerned at the prospect of possible incompatibility between national regulations on authors' royalties.
The proposed agreement seeks to resolve a dispute between the legendary search engine and two associations representing American authors and publishers, the US Authors' Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The agreement would grant Google permission to use the digitised content of the books and other works controlled by these bodies to make them available to the public, possibly accompanied by advertising or against payment.
Google's initiative extends to all works ever published in the United States, including many of European origin. Authors and publishers can remove their works from the programme “at any time”, said Dan Clancy, Google Head of Engineering. This would, however, require steps that would be “very onerous for many independent authors and small publishers,” warned an intellectual property specialist in Brussels. “My mother's a published novelist, but she doesn't even have the internet,” said Simon Juden of the UK Publishers' Association, adding, “How do you expect her to take the steps to opt out if she wants to?”
Google responded by saying that the move would be very much to the authors' advantage. “A large number of our partner publishers have noted that books are given a second life through their becoming available online,” Clancy said. This position was supported by library associations: “We discover books that we didn't even know we had,” said Sylvia van Petergem of the University of Ghent. She also welcomed the opportunity of carrying out electronic searches not only by title or author but also on the very text of works.
Controversy reigns particularly over out-of-print books, for which the copyright holder cannot be contacted or is unknown (so-called “orphan” works). These represent a significant proportion of the books in libraries both in the US and in Europe, and it is this mine that Google hopes to tap into. The European Commission sees an example to be followed. “90% of books in our national libraries are orphan books or out of print,” said the spokesman for Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding. “The US should inspire us to create a Europe-wide framework to allow digitisation of these books, giving consumers across Europe access to them, and allowing fair remuneration for authors.” The Commission also launched a public consultation exercise in August on digitised libraries, to run until 15 November. Reding's spokesman suggested that the Commission hoped to be in a position to prepare legislation on this issue by January 2010. His colleague at DG Internal Market added that the European solution could be “Google-style” but with elements of public-private partnership. Several digitisation initiatives are under way at European level at the moment, such as the Europeana and ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights to Information and Orphan Works) programmes. These differ from the Google project in that they are under the control of national and European public library associations.
The US legal system will examine the legitimacy of the settlement during a hearing at the federal court of Manhattan on 7 October. The German authorities submitted comments to the court that criticised the settlement's compatibility with German copyright law. The European Commission does not intend to get involved in the US affair. As well as the legal difficulties (it could not do so on the behalf of member states or on its own behalf), Ms Reding's spokesperson explained that, “it is not the role of the EC to intervene in such a private dispute in a third country”. Oliver Drewes added that, “for the moment, we are just on a mission to find out what stakeholders in Europe want us (the Commission: Ed.) to do, then we will report back to the Competitiveness Council”. (C.D./transl.rt/rh)