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DoJ Recommends NY Court Reject Google Book Deal
eldavojohn writes "The BBC and others are reporting on the US Department of Justice's recommendation to a New York court that they reject the Google book deal. The deal has received considerable attention, but for the most part it has been negative."
Lets just reform copyright law and eliminate this problem altogether.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
If you are so woried about not making any money from your out-of-print books, maybe you should consider printing them again?
In the case of authors I know, they are neither dead nor are there works out of print. But as their works were in print outside of the U.S. (though orderable online, that is how the works got into the libraries to be scanned), the Google settlement treated them as out of print, so Google was going to treat their books as orphaned works. I can understand the enthusiasm inside the U.S. for the deal (we can take everything published elsewhere in the world and take control of it), but the DOJ has to respect the copyright of other countries, as per the Berne convention. I wouldn't be surprised if a final result is based off the Google Partners program, which is the existing Google book search system where Google actually asks the authors permission. Asking people's permission solves all kinds of problems, and isn't normally considered evil. While it would still leave the genuinely orphaned works a problem, that is a problem created by stupid copyright extensions, and is ultimately solvable only by copyright reform.