Nearly 18,000 books from 570 Chinese writers have been scanned by Google and included in its digital library, Google Books, available only to Internet users in the United States.

“So far, no writers we reached said he or she had authorized Google to do the scanning,” said Zhang Hongbo, deputy director of China Written Works Copyright Society.

Daniel Alegre, Google’s vice-president of Asia Pacific Sales and Operations, said due to the huge amount of books scanned, it was difficult to contact every author.

Google and copyright organizations, such as the Authors’ Guild and the Association of American Publishers, submitted a revised settlement agreement on Saturday to a US court.

The settlement, for a 2005 lawsuit over Google’s ambitious plan to digitize books from major US libraries, outlined a plan to create a comprehensive database of in-print and out-of-print works. But the original agreement drew much criticism.

The revisions to the settlement primarily address the handling of so-called orphan works, the millions of books whose rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

Source : Konaxis