Congress pressed to act on Google book settlement
The world's largest university press has called for immediate action by the US Congress to prevent Google gaining exclusive rights to exploit the "orphan works" made available through its book search initiative. Tim Barton, president of the US arm of Oxford University Press, said students' tendency to overlook books they could not find online made the settlement Google struck last October with publishers that had accused it of copyright infringement "a remarkable and remarkably ambitious achievement." However, he said there was no "public good" in the settlement's proposal to grant Google a monopoly over "orphan" titles, whose copyright holders cannot been found. "If the parties to the settlement cannot themselves solve this major problem, then at a minimum Congress should pass orphan-works legislation that gives others the same rights as Google," Mr Barton wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education.