Google has proposed a settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over their book scanning project. A lot however, doesn’t agree with the search giant’s proposal.
According to director of the Internet Archive Peter Brantley, the three big tech companies have signed on to a coalition against Google’s proposal assembled by the Internet Archive and Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer.
The Internet Archive is a San Francisco nonprofit that offers “permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.”
Several participants have also agreed to part. These include New York Library Assn., the Special Libraries Assn. and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. The group will be issuing a joint statement next week.
William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, which represents hundreds of writers, the National Writers Union and a group of professors from the University of California, has also voiced out their opposition on the settlement.
So what are they against to?
The settlement, which was reached last October, would allow the search giant to continue to do digitalize millions of out-of-print books. Authors and publishers get 70% of the sale and Google gets to keep 30%. Google would also be able to sell ads around book searches that “involve out-of-print books that are still under copyright protection,” LA Times reports.
With all of these, Google would have the power to raise the prices to prohibitive levels. There is also a possibility that Google would not guarantee the privacy of its readers.
“By having a set of organizations speaking together, we can demonstrate the seriousness which we all confront by the issues raised by the proposal,” Brantley said in an interview. “We are all united in our understanding of the core issues, such as its impact on competitiveness and the threat to reader privacy.”
Hmmmn, will all of these companies against Google, do you think they’d still get this settlement?
Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/08/google-books-microsoft-yahoo-amazon.html
