Google’s digital library has raised hackles among Internet rivals such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon and triggered fears among some European copyright holders that their exclusive rights could be eroded.<\/p>\n
Google spokesman Bill Echikson said the company would try to take these concerns on board and would appoint two European representatives to a registry that oversees the project – one representative for authors and one for publishers.<\/p>\n
He also said that Google would do more to check that English-language editions of books originally published in a European language weren’t wrongly listed as out-of-print in the United States. Publishers feared that adding such books to the Google library would lose them sales and hurt their right to sell books in their catalog.<\/p>\n
The European Commission is Monday holding a hearing to examine the effect of Google’s 10-month settlement with U.S. authors and publishers on copyright holders in the European Union.<\/p>\n
Unlike the U.S., Google is only scanning European books over 150 years of age to avoid infringing copyrighted material.<\/p>\n