Creative Commons licensed works available on Google Books

By EDRi · August 26, 2009

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Deutsch: [Unter Creative Commons lizenzierte Werke auf Google Books erhältlich | http://www.unwatched.org/node/1501]

Google Books announced on 13 August 2009 the launching of an initiative
allowing writers, artists and publishers to specify their works as Creative
Commons (CC) works, being able to choose between the six CC version 3
licenses, a public domain license or the CC “no rights reserved” license.
This gives right holders a simple way to give clear indications on the legal
rights they have to CC-licensed works found through Google Books and tell
readers whether and how they can use the copyrighted books.

A few authors have already made their CC books available on Google Books and
these books have been marked by a matching logo on the book’s left hand
navigation bar. Books can thus be downloaded, shared and even modified and
remixed if the right holder has chosen to allow this.

People downloading these books agree to use them only as specified by the
license, as for instance giving proper credit to the author in case of
remixing and further public distributions.

Google Books also announced that according to the publisher’s choice, it
will introduce the option to restrict searches of books accordingly.
Representatives of the Book Rights Registry have also shown the intention to
allow the free distribution by right holders of CC-licensed works in case
the settlement is approved in court.

This action might come also in light of the late criticism and investigation
of Google Books by the European Commission with the hearing to come very
soon on 7 September. The hearing seems to come late, as 4 September is
the deadline of submissions on the settlement that the US Judge has set in
this case. With a final decision in this case estimated on 7 October, the
European hearing finds widespread disagreement between different publishers.

Bringing the power of Creative Commons to Google Books (13.08.2009)
http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/bringing-power-of-creative-commons-to.html

Google Books adds Creative Commons license options (13.08.2009)
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/16823

Europe Divided on Google Book Deal (24.08.2009)

EDRI-gram: EU EC hearing on Google book deal (29.07.2009)
http://www.edri.org/edri-gram/number7.15/ec-investigating-google-books