This is important stuff and is something that has been at the heart of my objections to the Settlement. From the Open Book Alliance website: Today, the Open Book Alliance released a comprehensive analysis that details how the proposed Google Books Settlement violates international laws and treaties.  A full version of the study can be found here.worldCynthia Arato, partner at the law firm of Macht, Shapiro, Arato and Isseries and a prominent litigator on intellectual property and copyright issues, finds that “numerous provisions of the proposed Google Books settlement would, if approved, violate the treaty obligations of the U.S.  If the settlement is...

The Financial Times (registration required) is reporting that photographers and illustrators are preparing to file a class action copyright infringement suit against Google over the images used in the publications Google has been digitizing. “Google is scanning in books and publications with visual images, which impedes the rights of the copyright holders of those images. We are seeking compensation for that,” said James McGuire, founding partner of the New York office of law firm Mishcon de Reya, who is leading the case. ... Mr McGuire said losses to photographers and illustrators were likely to be “quite substantial” although it was hard...

From the site: The rights of authors are under attack In the US the big publishers have gone into a huddle with Google and cooked up the Google Book Settlement, with the co-operation of the Authors Guild, whose statements on the matter suggest deep confusion. Google and its partners plan to use a settlement in a civil law case to overturn fundamental principles of copyright law. They are asking the court to approve a massive appropriation of rights from authors of printed books published in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. For more information check here....

A Paris court previously fined Google €300,000 in damages and €10,000/day for its breach of French copyright law in digitizing La Martinière books. Now, Google has appealed the verdict on copyright infringement and is claiming that their use of short excerpts in their index is fair use under French law. There is no indication in the article about how long it will take to decide the appeal....

David Drummond is Google's senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer. In an article about the Settlement published in the Guardian, Drummond states: Some have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, suggesting it will limit consumer choice and hand Google a monopoly. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other organisation from pursuing its own digitisation efforts. ... If we successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path. This is simply disingenuous, if not downright misleading. Google has used this line of reasoning before and it sounds pretty good to a...

Given the importance of this matter I am reprinting their response in full. The Guild argues that the it is avoiding the pitfalls that the RIAA fell into. They say the RIAA won every battle but lost the war and infringement didn't truly abate until Apple moved in with an easy and cheap way to buy music. The Guild seems to be saying that they are putting Google in Apple's place in the publishing context: February 5, 2010. As you may be reading in today's paper, the Justice Department in its filing regarding our settlement with Google continues to...

The companies objected to the pricing mechanisms saying that the settlement allows Google to discount the list price and even sell at a token price if it wants. This could hurt Hachette's name and the reputation of its authors. Hachette UK also said that it had not received an identification of the works that had been digitized and Hachette Livre said that it will cost more than the minimum cash payment Google is to make for the books to determine which its works classify as books under the Settlement. More detail here....

The Canadian Writers Against Google Settlement (CWAG) has filed a series of objections to the proposed Revised Settlement. I found two of them especially interesting. You can find their full filing here. ... With respect to the problem of licensing the work of unlocatable copyright holders, we prefer the existing Canadian approach to a Google-run monopoly. An oft-repeated claim about the Amended Settlement is that it will allow the legal dissemination of copyrighted material for which an author cannot be found. The dissemination of these “orphan works” is indeed an important issue. However, Canadian copyright law already contains...