It’s hard to escape the view that what really annoys the European book industry about Google’s ambitious digital library project is that only US internet users will be allowed to browse in it.
According to some estimates, a third or more of the in-copyright books that Google is scanning in US libraries are from European publishers and authors, but European internet users won’t get to see these works. The legal settlement only involves the digital rights to display them in the US.
If this galvanises Europe to work harder to create the conditions for its own digital library, so much the better. But as EU commissioner Viviane Reding warned at the end of this week, there are some significant hurdles to be overcome.
Foremost among them is Europe’s fragmented copyright regime. Europeana, the European digital library project, so far claims 4.6m books, but these are almost all out-of-copyright works (and you have to be fluent in French to get the most out of it, since nearly half the works are in that language).
Rights to distribute digital works are often restricted to individual countries, making it hard to build a continent-wide system. And that is even without taking into account the problem of orphan works, which is every bit as thorny as it is the US – and unlike the US, there is no chance of using the settlement of a private class action lawsuit as a way to circumvent the problem.
Ms Reding is right to use the Google dispute to provoke a debate in Europe, with a public consultation period running until November 15th, but it’s hard to see what can come out of it in the short term.
