France, Privacy Advocates Voice Google Book Deal Concerns

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on September 8, 2009 - 8:57am.

Mountain View, Calif. - Responding to concerns voiced by Germany, France and the European Commission, Google (NASD: GOOG) announced that it will not include European out-of-print works that are still in copyright in its massive digital book index without authors' permissions. A French Cultural Ministry official told Reuters that France will join Germany in asking a U.S. court to block Google's proposed $125 million settlement with authors over its book-scanning project.

"Google will have a monopoly digitalizing European orphan works without permission," Nicolas Georges, director for books and libraries at the French Culture Ministry, told Reuters.

In addition to the concession on authors' permissions, Google said it will also appoint two foreign representatives to the board of its Books Rights Registry.

Along with copyright concerns, and monopoly concerns voiced by Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo, new privacy-based opposition to the settlement has also been voiced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic of the University of California.

Those groups said in a brief filed with the court handling the settlement that Google should be compelled to "create a robust privacy policy that gives readers as much privacy in online books as they have in a library or a bookstore and to ensure that the policy is enforceable and overseen by the court on an ongoing basis."

Both those groups and another, Consumer Watchdog, said that a draft privacy policy for books that Google released last week did not go far enough to protect consumers' privacy.

Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/roaof (Reuters)

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10346253-93.html

http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/09/08

http://snipurl.com/roaqi (Wired.com)

http://snipurl.com/roar1 (Consumer Watchdog)