A couple of weeks back, BookBrunch featured an article looking at a new way of tackling the problem of finding the owners of orphan works—books that are still under copyright but whose current owners are unknown. It is estimated that up to 40% of library holdings may be orphaned. Google’s solution for Google Books was simply to proceed with scanning anyway and let the rightsholders come after them. But ARROW, a project of the European Commission’s eContentplus program, is trying to make large-scale orphan rights searches feasible and productive. But if this process of...

On Saturday, Publishing Perspectives had an interesting story about the problem of digitizing orphan works in Europe. It’s a little hard to count them, given that different countries use different standards for orphanhood, but a European Commission report (PDF) guesses that there are about three million orphan books—books that are still in copyright but whose owners are difficult or impossible to locate—across its member countries. Among the key findings of the report, which also considers orphan films, photographs, newspapers and music, was that the biggest obstacle to digitization is not the cost of the digitization...

Now this is an initiative that we all should get behind. According to Neelie Kroes, EU commissioner for the Digital Agenda: "User data is moving more and more into the 'cloud' and people are getting their music, videos and applications digitally (for example through iTunes) instead of buying them in physical media," Kroes said. "We need to make sure that significant market players cannot just choose to deny interoperability with their product. This is particularly important in cases where standards don't exist," she said. "Under the Digital Agenda for Europe, we will examine the feasibility of introducing measures to make big market...

We've previously reported on the ACTA treaty which is being negotiated in secret among the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union, and a number of other governments. This treaty, which often looks a lot more like a copyright treaty than a counterfeit-goods treaty, could have profound implications for many ordinary Internet users (including e-book readers), such as imposing a “three-strikes” provision that would cut off Internet access to accused infringers. Now an overwhelming majority of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted, 663 to 13, for a resolution criticising the Treaty and saying that the MEPs will go the...

John's Blog has a review of this Astak unit and finds it disappointing and "... a poor substitute for a paper weight." _____ NPRs Morning Edition has a story on ereaders which you can listen to here. _____ Amazon is publishing its best-selling items for 2009 and you can find their bestselling books listed here. You can sort by year, month and week. ----- ComputerWorld UK publishes an excerpt from a “Reflection Document” from the European Commission entitled “Creative Content in a European Digital Single Market: Challenges for the Future” ...

Presently copyright is controlled by the separate laws of each of the European Union's 27 nations. According to an article in ECommerce Times the European Commission said it would look into revising copyright law to make it easier to scan books. The Commission will start work on this next year and look into, also, the status of orphan books. For a fuller explanation of the Commission's work take a look at the article....

The European Commission has adopted a Communication on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy and according to Viviane Reding, the Commissioner in charge of information society and the media will "... seize this opportunity to take the lead and ensure that books digitization takes place on the basis of European copyright law ... If we act swiftly, pro-competitive European solutions on books digitization may well be sooner operational than the solutions presently envisaged under the Google Books Settlement in the United States." The internal market Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, agreed with Reding and called for a pan-European system of book registries. You...

You can find a report of Reding's speech, given on October 1 in Brussels, at the link above. Reding's vision is important for the future flow of information and will, in my view, eventually result in Europe far surpassing the US in information flow and freedom. In her speech today at Brussels, she laid down her immediate priorities for a digital economy. They include boosting digital services, overcoming market fragmentation on business model and having better coordination on copyright issues within EU. She also emphasised on having a policy framework to prevent Europe from losing out to the US with...

The deadline to opt out of the Google Books settlement falls on this coming Friday. Expect to see a large number of articles about Google Books in the news (such as the piece Paul Biba posted earlier today) as the week draws toward a close. Here are a few I’ve seen over the past couple of days: The Guardian has a very good, fairly well-balanced summary of what Google has done so far in its Google Books project and what the issues are. If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, or just...

From a Europa press release.  For an earlier article on the copyright disagreements in the European Commission going on in see our article linked here. 4.6 million digitised books, maps, photographs, film clips and newspapers can now be accessed by internet users on Europeana, Europe's multilingual digital library ( www.europeana.eu ). The collection of Europeana has more than doubled since it was launched in November 2008 ( IP/08/1747 ). Today the European Commission, in a policy document declared as its target to bring the number of digitised objects to 10 million by 2010. The Commission also opened a public debate...

So reports EurActiv in an excellent article summarizing the current state of the Google controversy. Evidently the Information Society Commissioner, viviane Reading, supports Google's efforts, but the Internal Market Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy differs and he has called for a hearing which will be held on September 7. Here are a few excerpts from an article that deserves to be read in full. ... According to EU figures, only 5% of all digital books are available in the recently-established and free-to-access EU library Europeana. Almost half of these come from France, while other countries with massive libraries, such as Italy,...

From the Open Rights Group: With the European Parliament set to vote on 23 March on extending the term of copyright for sound recordings, key European experts opposing the extension have released a new letter to MEPs warning of the dangers. Highlighting that the costs to the public are likely to exceed €1 billion the academics warn: If Europe wishes to keep its ability to innovate, it must not lock in the current industry structure at a moment of great technological change, it must not inhibit digital creators and archives in the exploration of...