Google Book Project Tries to Placate the Critics: Will It Be Enough?
The brief filed by the Government of France notes with pride that French authors have won the Nobel Prize for Literature more often than authors from any other country, and made both philosophical and legal arguments. Two of its legal arguments were that:
* European and French copyright law require that each author's consent must be obtained in order to digitally reproduce, display and distribute. The proposed settlement violates that law by giving unfettered copying power to Google;
* The Berne Convention, to which both France and the US are party, prohibits any registration formality as a precondition for enjoying or enforcing a copyright interest. The settlement illegally re-imposes such formalities by requiring that authors register their works in order to enjoy any of the benefits of the proposed Settlement.