Ephemera VI: The Google Book Settlement (Links at the base of Piece)

The Google Library and Partnership projects: barely covered by the Irish Times.

I attended the Google Book Settlement Seminar at the RCSI this morning to get an overview of the case to date: Which I must emphasise is not settled yet, thus making the dates/issues/cases and general agitation by Google whose advisors and lawyers have created what is essentially an entirely arbitrary set of obfuscating circumstances to define book digitalisation.

I think it’s called Corporate avant-gardeism

A brief overview of the GBS:

i). Google has redefined what comprises Commercial availability.

ii). Through the Berne Convention (Which is covered by GBS) Irish Authors and Publishers have ‘A US Copyright interest: Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

iii). Google (for the moment one assumes) is excluding personal papers, sheet music, periodicals, public domain and governmental publications from the GBS.

* Oxford and Harvard have agreed with Goggle to digitalise their collections.

*2005: The Author’s Guild and Mc Graw Hill sue Google for copyright infringement.

* +7 Million books have been digitised of which 5 million were copyright protected.

(This means that they went ahead and infringed legal copyrights and decided to
fight the legal point at a later date)

* 2008: The Google Book settlement is achieved.

All info on the settlement will be available on a special Author’s help page:

Poetry Ireland , inquiries to info@poetryireland.ie

Legal, timeline and other info : Irish Copyright Licensing Agency: ICLA | Frontpage.

Google Settlement info: Google Book Search Settlement Notice to Rights-holders – Books & Inserts Registry

The only IT article was hidden in the financial pages : In short – The Irish Times – Fri, Jul 10, 2009

The European Commission is meeting on this on the 07/09/09 to look at anti-trust elements which are also brewing in the US (the speaker indicated that this is generally part of a class action in the US).

because a number of cheap US authors thought to support the Goliath, the issues has spread virally into the EU whereby anti-trus meeting and Berne Convention will directly impinge on Irish Publishers and Authors. The US Library of Congress is not supporting the Google library or Partnership projects.

Berne Convention.
ICLA.
Poetry Ireland Mainpage
The Google Book Settlement.
Author’s Guild.