Google finds opposition in copyright case

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sept. 9 (UPI) -- A court filing shows that U.S. technology firm Google Inc. has yet to appease stakeholders concerned with privacy guarantees in a global copyright debate.

Google, involved in a book scanning project involving millions of books, has said it would fund a Book Registry with $125 million that would compensate European authors and publishers with a base fee and 63 percent of future revenue generated from use of copyrighted material, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday.

Google also said it would not offer books that were out of print in the United States, but still available commercially in Europe without first negotiating permission to do so.

But the massive book scanning project has garnered international criticism. The European Commission held a hearing on the plan and the U.S. Department of Justice is probing the deal on anti-trust concerns.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and several other groups filed a brief objecting to Google's privacy policy.

The brief says the policy "fails to safeguard reader privacy."

Google has said it would allow "protections to limit the information (such as book titles) available to credit card companies about book purchases, and to enable (users) to delete or disassociate the titles of books purchased from your Google Account," the Chronicle reported.