Germany filed court papers in federal court in New York objecting to Google Inc's  settlement with book authors and publishers, saying it is illegal under both German and wider European law.

It’s the first national government to object to the deal, though U.S. regulators and other governmental bodies are looking into it on antitrust grounds.

Google’s proposed deal, which has a judge’s preliminary blessing but still faces a hearing early next month where critics can object to it, lets the Mountain View giant hang onto 37 percent of sales of online books and from ads associated with online sales pages.

The rest of the money goes to a group that will use it to pay those with copyrights to the books sold.
Google has already scanned some 10 million books.

The dispute centers around the way Google wants to display bits of text from copyrighted books, many of them out of print, in its search results.

The company believes fair-use laws permit it to show some of their text, and under the new deal it will be able to show up to 20 percent of the text of a book that’s out of print but still under copyright.
But the fight is also about bigger issues, particularly the fears of some critics about letting a moneymaking business gain control of such a vast pool of valuable, ostensibly public information.

Some universities that have let Google scan their books, such as the University of California, Berkeley, have also joined a nonprofit digital archive project meant to last centuries because of their concerns about the limited lifespan of a private business like Google.

The deal was cobbled together after a 2005 lawsuit where writers and publishers complained that Google’s huge digitization project infringed copyrights. The company at first balked at their complaints — it sees the book-scanning project as part of its public mission to make as much information, whether it’s books, old newspapers, maps or paintings or photographs, available to as many people as possible.

Indeed, the work Google has done with universities and other archives has freed many old and obscure books from musty library annexes or storerooms, making them freely available online. But most of those works are in the public domain, and their copyright isn’t in dispute.



Meanwhile, Sony Corp, which unveiled some slick new electronic book readers this summer, has thrown its weight behind the deal, which it says will greatly benefit consumers. Sony, seeking to knock Amazon.com Inc off its throne as king of e-readers, has cut a deal with Google to give users of Sony devices access to the growing library of books scanned by Google.


The University of Wisconsin has also backed the settlement.
Authors whose books have been scanned by Google can submit a claim under the settlement and will be paid $60 for each book of theirs Google has put in its archive. They’ll also get payments based on the sales of their work through Google’s store.



Agencies