Germans taking Google to court

Wed 2 September 2009 09:04, Editors

A lot has already been said about Google Books in the last couple of weeks. Last week we already mentioned that several European national societies were opposing to Google's book deal with American libraries.

We then also noted that the German government had already hired an American law firm to look into legal actions. Today the Germans actually opposed in a U.S. court filing.

The filing was signed by Johannes Christian Wichard, deputy director general of the Directorate Commercial and Economic Law, in Germany's Justice Ministry. He believes the deal is against German laws and doesn't support the German authors and publishers: "The decision of this court with respect to this settlement will have the dramatic and long-range effect of creating a new worldwide copyright regime without any input from those who will be greatly impacted -- German authors, publishers and digital libraries and German citizens," he said.

Authors have until the end of the week to oppose to their books being digitized by Google.

Microsoft and Yahoo have taken the German side in the matter. They officially opposed to the deal. They however won't get the support of the EC. Viviane Reding, a EU media commissioner, believes the deal is a good thing: "It is good to see that new business models are evolving which could allow bringing more content to an increasing number of consumers."

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Comments (1)

- steveballmer
- [website]
Good luck!

Wed 2 Sep 2009, 14:06

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