French and German publishers are at odds with the US book industry over how to respond to search engine giant Google’s audacious bid to monetize nearly a century of semi-forgotten books.
The continentals hope a proposed 125-million-dollar settlement between Google and the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers will collapse. A US court in New York is to hear the issue anew next month.
Alexander Skipis, chief executive of the Boersenverein, Germany’s publishers’ and booksellers’ association, said a court adjournment to hear more than 350 objections, including a challenge from the US Department of Justice, had shown the deal was a “failure.”
But the Germans and French have not been able to propose any alternative way to build a world library of out-of-print books online, other than appealing for their governments to take over the task, an unlikely prospect in the current recession.
At a September 7 Brussels hearing, EU officials spoke up for the public interest in bringing so-called “orphan works” back into circulation, saying Google was offering a solution.
The orphans are the nearly forgotten books that never became best sellers. The authors are dead. The files have been lost. Often, the publishing companies no longer exist. A handful of people still need the information in the books, but cannot find any copies.
Under copyright law, private enterprises are not supposed to scan old books and offer copies to people who need them. They are supposed to first mount investigations into the provenance first, reconstructing the rights history and tracking down heirs to ask.
That is a lot of work, just to provide a few pages from a library book. Under some jurisdictions, copyright extends 75 years from the death of an author. So some books written when authors were young, back in the 19th century, are still tied up by these laws.
US publishers…