The Google Book Settlement and the European Commission.

I refer in short to the Google Book Settlement as the GBS throughout this series of posts, the links for which I will include at the base of this short piece.

Yesterday there was a meeting of the European Commission (07/09/09) re the GBS which yielded what Irish Media refer to as concessions to European authors and publishing houses.

How Big of Google to recognise that the GBS is an irritant encompassing:

i). Breach of copyright.

ii).No robust data privacy rules and the use of deposit library relationships to advance the GBS above the heads of authors.

The Telegraph referred to the meeting as out for European authors and betwixt the two lies a truth. The manipulation of the Berne Convention to subvert intellectual property rights law in an era wherein governments  (such as In China) can proscribe forms and words that they disprove of incl. the utilisation of search engine terms (such as in the Green Dam youth filtering software) would point to Google vying for a market dominance without the requisite ethical approach to Freedom of Information and data privacy.

if you can make a word vanish in China you can remove books from the digitisation project at the behest of government, not to mind that the GBS scanning omits pictorials and forewords.

I am adding in here the two P.ie posts on the issue:

• EC Meeting of 07/09/09
• GBS links
• Reports on the EC Meeting:
• Telegraph 08/09/09
• GBS and Privacy.
• GBS Facts Pages for Authors and publishers
• Electronic Frontier Foundation on data privacy
• The Berne Convention from Wiki.