Google Attends EU Hearing Regarding Book Deal
Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: Google, Book, Deal, European, Union | Themes: The Internet, Business
Google is today attending a hearing in Europe that aims to address concerns surrounding the Google Books settlement.
Search giant Google today is attending a hearing arranged by the European Commission. Bloomberg reports that today's hearing will hear comments about how Google's deal with U.S. author's and publishers will affect the 27 member states of the European Union.
Already facing scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Germany, the Google Books deal with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers will see millions of out of print but in copyright books digitized.
Forbes reports that Google at the hearing sought to assure European copyright holders that the deal wouldn't infringe their rights. The company says it wrote to several national publisher associations "to clarify that books that are commercially available in Europe will be treated as commercially available under the settlement."
Check out the full story on Forbes.
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The EU seems to take every opportunity possible to steal from US companies. I say we just leave their market alone for a year and see what happens.
I say we just leave their market alone for a year and see what happens.
Do you have any idea of the demand for US products in the EU?
To "leave their market alone" would be to sacrifice tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.
Also, it will only divert the demand to EU substitute providers, strengthening the competition of rivals based in the EU and thus forfeiting further hundreds of billions of dollars in the form of lost future sales.
Really stupid comment.
+1 bogcotton, incredibly stupid comment. The same people who object to US companies being "picked on" by the EU, are the same people who fail to see how Microsoft and Google outsourcing our tech jobs to India could possibly be a bad thing. Republican sheep and the people who herd them around...
+1 webbwbb, brilliant! Let's drive the trade deficit up even further by castrating the last of our exports, well done. *claps*
Oh silly disputes why can't there be interesting stores that aren't just waiting to be/are blunders when it comes to politician and people of that sort.
I still dont' get what's that about.
So google miraculously gets rights on all books on this planet, that are not commercially available? Who gives them permission on that?
If the customer would only benefit from these "fights" and not just some corporations.Presumably I could understand why countries would opose this but Microsoft and Yahoo! fear that google might get something more to beat them with and Amazon fears losing "supremacy". ...Sigh...
Google doesn't miraculously get rights on all books on the planet, they want to secure rights for out of print books and sell digitized copies - sending back their cuts to authors or copyright holders.
But, since they do that on a huge scale (instead of buying rights for one book at a time), this kind of deal requires careful examining - because they could effectively get a monopoly on all out of print books, harming consumers and copyright holders alike.
The hearing is for them to defend how this won't happen with the deals they want to make.
@webbwbb: yeah, right. I recommend you a book: 'economics for Dummies', chapter 2, 'why protectionism is suicide' (right after chaper 1, 'economics and commerce is the exchange of goods').
The kids in my neighborhood are mentally deficient. I seriously doubt they will be reading out of print books now or in the future.