| On 12.21.09, In Uncategorized, by deep |
The ongoing battle between Google and the French government over the book scanning project has led Paris court to rule Google as the culprit over copyright violation. The tension between Google and the Book publisher is heating up and Google has plans to appeal the ruling. Further in their frustration, Google have claimed that its in the loss of French public as they will not be able to search for books and buy them.
Google argues that French readers are the biggest losers, since they won’t have access to a large pool of knowledge. “If readers are able to search and find books, they’re more likely to buy and read them,” Stricker said.
On the other hand, Google have been charged huge capital for the loss of publisher. Also, this comes after the announcement of French Government’s own book scanning projects.
A judge ordered Google to pay 300,000 euros, or roughly $430,000, in damages to French publisher La Martiniere, which pursued the case on behalf of a group of publishers, The Associated Press reported. In addition, Google was ordered to pay a fine of 10,000 euros, or $14,340, every day, until it removes literary extracts from the publishers’ books from its database.
This is a battle between the traditional publisher and 21st’s distributor. In context of distributor, its all about getting your content to the world and Google is top in distribution channel. But in the digital age, there is a big conflict between solving the issue over scanning the document and giving it for free. Its the similar situation as digital music. We are still in an age where the content are first distributed in hard copy. It took music industry ages to comply with the technology and go digital.
The book author also need to understand the potential of digital content the way Music artist have. Only when the writers are aware of these facts, they can push the publishers to go digital. Though many eBooks are being distributed on Amazon and EBay, they are still following the old models.
The breaking of ice between digital content and copyright issue must be solved with open mind and not following any old paradigm of thoughts. Today, you and I are both the content creator and distributor, we live in an eco-system of complex network, there must be better ways to give writers recognition and benefits.
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