Google Meets the European Commisssion

Google made concessions on Monday to address concerns its book digitization project has raised in Europe.

Martyn: Google made concessions on Monday to address concerns it bug digitization project to be raised in Europe. In a letter to 16 European publishers, Google propose giving two of the 8 director positions on its propose US book registry to 9 US publishers. Google paid 125 US dollars to create the industry which will act as a middle man between it and publishers and ensure that copyright owners are compensated for digitization of their work. The proposal came as Dan Clancy, engineering director at Google met European commissioner for the information society in media Viviane Reding in Brussels. US publishers sued Google for failing to respect their copyright when the company started digitizing their books, a deal was reached covering books that is still under copyright, once whose copyright has expired, and a large number of books that are technically still protected, but out of print and where the copyright owner can't be located. Viviane: First one that the authors must be remunerated. They must get the money for the work they have done. And second, our European citizens must get access to the books. So in the new digitized world, I mean to get the digitized books of our cultural diversity of this millions and millions of books in our libraries is of at most importance. Martyn: Google also promised not to include European works in its digitization process in the US without first consulting the publishers. Resistance to the US deal is strong among some politicians, libraries and publishers, particularly in Germany and France. But Reding said digitization of books needs help from the private sector. Viviane: You must know that today, of those millions and millions of books which are in our national libraries in our university libraries, only one percent has been digitized. So here we have a herculean task in front of us. We need to digitized those books, I want governments to come in, I want private enterprise to come in, I want public private partnership because we need to digitized our books in order our citizens to be able to read them. Martyn: Europe’s different national copyright regime opposed a further problem for Google. So far, it’s agreed to only digitize books in European libraries that were published earlier in 1869. With reporting by Paul Mela in Brussels, this is Martyn Williams, IDG News Service.