At MCN 2009 in Portland, Oregon, next month, Prof. Tyler Ochoa of Santa Clara Law School will discuss the Google Book Settlement and how it affects us, not only as individuals but as museums. "More from Less: the e-Book Revolution and Mobile Evolution" will happen on Nov. 14. Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive and Cheryle Robertson from LACMA will round out the roundtable, so to speak, but you the audience will be an important part of the discussion. All are welcome.
For more on what Peter Brantley is up to, see this article from yesterday's Register: "Internet Archive uncloaks open ebook dream machine" The Internet Archive and various like-minded partners have launched an open architecture for selling and lending digital books online, an effort to consolidate the fledgling market for net texts - and give Google a little food for thought... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/20/internet_archive_bookserver_la Amalyah Keshet ________________________________ From: Amalyah Keshet [akes...@imj.org.il] Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 10:19 AM To: 'Museum Computer Network Listserv' Subject: IP SIG: Google's book scanning prompts review of EU copyright laws Forwarded from another list (With thanks to Peter Brantley) ______________________________________________ By AOIFE WHITE (AP) BRUSSELS - The European Commission said Monday it may revise copyright law to make it easier for companies like Google Inc. to scan printed books and distribute digital copies over the Internet. Such changes would likely include ways to more easily compensate authors and publishers, possibly through a statutory license in which a company would automatically get rights to scanning and would pay royalties to a collective pool. Money from that pool would then get distributed to copyright holders. Under Europe's current patchwork of copyright laws, rights are now managed separately in each of the European Union's 27 nations, making it difficult to seek permission to republish or digitize content, especially when the rights holder is hard to find. The European Commission said it would start work next year, with the goal of encouraging mass-scale digitization and suggesting ways for compensating copyright holders. Any suggested changes to European law would have to be approved by EU governments and lawmakers. The commission said the move was partly triggered by a hearing it held in September where European authors, publishers, libraries and technology companies spoke out about how they would be affected by a deal Google is negotiating in the U.S. Google has been scanning millions of books still under U.S. copyright. Under a tentative settlement with U.S. authors and publishers, that will cover all books unless the copyright holders object. A judge still needs to approve the settlement after the parties make changes to address U.S. Justice Department concerns. EU antitrust authorities are not examining it. The European Commission, the EU executive, said that deal would create a situation where "the vast number of European works in U.S. libraries that have been digitized by Google would only be available to consumers and researchers in the U.S. but not in Europe itself." EU regulators want to study this year the impact of new rules on so-called orphan works - books in which the copyright holder can't be traced or where copyright is unclear. One idea under consideration is having a manager stand in for authors who aren't represented by the existing copyright agencies that collect and distribute royalties. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hgxcBsVhsOgXVGn04IJaUOqk2qqwD9BE8AU01
