Google Makes Some Concessions in Book Settlement Deal, France wants “Orphans” Protection

Google reported that it has agreed to make a few concessions to European counterparts who voiced concerns about the implications of the Google Books Search Settlement Deal. Though the deal was previously announced, the company is still fighting on either sides of the Atlantic to gain both judicial and regulatory acceptance. Google is facing a lot of flak and criticism from self-interested parties as well as legal officials who believe that the company will more or less monopolize the “orphan” book industry if the deal goes through. “Orphan” books are those which have only copyright but uncertain rights ownership or unknown authors.

A Bloomberg story on EU concessions reported that Google has agreed to let two of the company’s representatives outside US to join the board responsible for administering the digital books settlement. The second agreement is that books that are still commercially available and have copyright protection within Europe will not be considered out to print.

After the EU hearing in Brussels, Google had blogged about the manifold benefits of digitizing the entire European collection; this was vehemently opposed by competitors like Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo of the Open Book Alliance who bought out the negatives of such a deal.

Viviane Reding and Charlie McCreevy, two EU Commissioners, have bought out a joint statement favoring the digitization deal that can be considered pan-European.

The two main critics of the settlement deal are Germany and France. In fact France has decided to file objections against the deal in the New York US court and a hearing has been scheduled for Oct 7th. Reuters reported that Nicolas Georges, the French Culture Minister is highly concerned about the monopoly of Google over all the “orphaned” reading material. Earlier in the year, Germany had also filed similar objections against the digitization deal.

Google will probably have to make many more concessions before the settlement deal is finally formalized. One thing that is pretty clear is the common interest of the stakeholders to allow book scanning as they believe governments do not have the necessary resources or the will to carry it out themselves.

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