Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-11-26-Speech-4-075"
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"en.20091126.4.4-075"2
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"Madam President, the opportunities offered by the internet have inspired Google to revive in cyberspace books which are out of print, forgotten, or which have vanished in the mists of time. The grand idea of creating a modern counterpart of the Alexandrian Library has, however, given rise to disputes on the issue of copyright.
The agreement reached two weeks ago satisfied the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers and some of their European counterparts. It allows titles published in four countries to be scanned and made available against payment. These countries are the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. internet users from these countries will be able to read 20% of e-books free of charge (with the costs covered by advertisers) and will have to pay to read the remaining 80%.
From the author’s and the publisher’s point of view, this will have a two-fold benefit. In the first place, it will generate a one-off payment from Google of USD 60 to 300 for the right to scan the book and, in the second place, 63% of the profits generated from the e-book through the Google Books service. In other words, authors will make money from publishing even a single page of their own books on the internet.
Yet few people take into account the fact that non-British European users of Google Books, for example a Belgian or Polish internet user, will not even have access to those 20% of e-books. The service covers mainly English-language titles, and any European publishers or authors wishing to join the programme will have to deal with Google themselves. Europeans will have free access only to the least attractive categories of book – titles which are in the public domain and whose copyright has long since expired, for example, books in the
which have not been taken out for 200 years. This will not result in a complete electronic library of European titles being built up.
In addition to certain reservations regarding the Google Project, such as the company’s monopoly on the preparation and distribution of e-books and the need to pay it a share of the revenue and advertising, I believe that the lack of a unified system of copyright in the European Union will make it inefficient. The legal commotion surrounding Google has shown the consequences of the lack of uniform copyright law in the European Union as well as the impossibility of giving a unified response to the Google Books initiative. It is plain for all to see that harmonising copyright in the European Union has become an urgent necessity."@en1
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"Bibliothèque nationale de France"1
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