David Bolt is a distinguished Canadian actor and playwright, active for over 40 years in Canadian theatre. He has been closely following the Google Book Settlement and its possible implications for Canadian creators. I’ve invited him to contribute his analysis of the international response to Google’s case, now before the U.S. court.

Bolt is one of a tiny handful of Canadian writers speaking up publicly against the Google Settlement. He was interviewed about Google in this week’s issue of ‘Tandem’, (Corriere Canadese’s English-language supplement.)

A Canadian’s Perspective

Sarah — Since Canadian papers are not covering the Frankfurt Book Fair, I thought your blog readers might be interested to know what is going on there.
The first big item for discussion is the Google Settlement.  Europeans don’t like this thing at all and the German government (in the person of Chancellor Angela Merkel) kicked the whole thing off by announcing “We reject the scanning in of books without any copyright protection, like Google is doing. The government places a lot of weight on this position on copyrights to protect writers in Germany.”

The Frankfurt meetings have been very heated, with the result that Google is now saying that that Europeans could be exempted from the settlement.  What bothers me, as a Canadian, is that our writers’ union, TWUC, has not been merely acquiescent but has actually thanked the Authors’ Guild for defending writers’ interests  — not once but several times, in comments to the CBC and to the newspapers.  For shame! Otherwise, Google would also be saying that Canadian books might be excluded.  It’s beginning to look like they might be, in a catch-all basket of non-U.S. copyright holders, but only thanks to the efforts of a host of other countries besides our own.  How nice we are, to avoid conflict and let the rest of the world solve our Google problem.

The other big issue in Frankfurt is electronic publishing generally, a subject on which Canadians have been remarkably silent, except for you.  The Europeans are well aware that the e-juggernaut is headed their way, and European publishers are being exhorted to “stop whining” and revise their business models.  Again, this is in sharp contrast to Canada where publishers apparently want to make up their shortfalls by gouging authors’ royalties.  So far as I have been able to find out, our writers’ unions are going along with the publishers’, well, whining.
Carry on, and good luck.

David Bolt

p.s. Here are  some news excerpts with links:

Frankfurt Book Fair: Europeans Play the Moral Rights Card Against Google Settlement

By Andrew Albanese — Publishers Weekly, 10/16/2009 8:03:00 AM

There’s been a simmering anti-Google sentiment at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, no doubt connected to European objections to the Google Book Search Settlement. And on Friday that simmer reached a boil, as the deal faced harsh—at times, puzzling—criticism at a registration-required panel on “European and American Positions Towards the Google Settlement.”

Exempting Europeans from Google Settlement

Fury in Frankfurt at Google’s global library project

By William Ickes – Sun Oct 18, 2009 1:26AM EDT

FRANKFURT (AFP) -
“Garbage” and “hysterical propaganda” was one angry reaction at the world’s biggest book fair this year when Google, the world’s biggest Internet information service, defended plans to turn millions of books into electronic literature available online.

The row erupted at the 61st international Frankfurt Book Fair, a major annual literary event…. read entire article

Book publishers fear advance of digital ‘glacier’

Frankfurt – Online writing is like an unstoppable “glacier” coming towards the world book publishing industry, says a book industry expert, summing up the worries for the future this week at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. “Digital content is completely altering the publishing industry,” said Eoin Purcell, a consultant and writer, warning that even the most respected names in publishing will not be able to claim any “right to survive” in the new book economy…. read entire article