Don't fuck with the Chinese

Sharon LaFraniere has the story in The New York Times:

A long-running dispute over Google’s efforts to digitize books has spread this month to China, where authors have banded together to demand that their works be protected from what they call unauthorized copying. Two Chinese writers’ groups claim that Google has scanned Chinese works into an electronic database in violation of international copyright standards. The organizations are urging China’s authors to step forward and defend their rights. “Google has seriously violated the copyrights of Chinese authors. That is an undeniable fact,” Chen Qirong, a spokesman for the China Writers’ Association, said by telephone. The group says it represents nearly 9,000 writers. Google has sent a representative to Beijing to meet with officials of the China Written Works Copyright Society, which manages Chinese copyrights. The company insists it has fully complied with copyright protections.
Google’s ambitions to digitize millions of books, in most cases without first seeking permission from publishers or authors, has been contentious in the United States and elsewhere for more than four years.
But most Chinese authors learned of Google’s efforts only this month, after writers’ groups were notified of a potential class-action settlement between Google and American authors and publishers. Some Chinese authors discovered that Google had obtained their works from libraries in the United States and scanned them into its database.
The settlement would allow Google to create a vast library and bookstore where the full text of the digitized books would be available in the United States. For now, the books appear only in the company’s Book Search service, which allows people to read short snippets of copyrighted texts or, if the company has obtained permission, longer excerpts.
“We take the view, backed up by international copyright law, that no copyright is violated in this process since the amount of text displayed is so small and it’s purely for information,” said Courtney Hohne, a Google spokeswoman, in an phone interview from Singapore. “In fact, it’s comparable to a quotation from a book in a review or our Web search results, both of which are perfectly legal.”
Ms. Hohne said it was virtually impossible for Google to discover who holds the rights to all of the millions of books on library shelves. Waiting for copyright holders to surface would doom any effort to create a comprehensive electronic index, she said. If a copyright holder does object, Google removes the snippets or even all reference to the book from the search engine, she said.
The Chinese groups see it differently. “It is as if you have something nice in your living room and Google takes it and puts it in its living room,” said Zhang Hongbo, deputy director general of the Chinese copyright society. “We are definitely opposed to using our works without our permission.”
The class-action settlement, if approved, would create a registry of copyright holders and allow them to share in revenue generated through online book purchases or subscriptions to the database. Mr. Zhang said Chinese authors didn’t like the proposed settlement either. “We think that reconciliation is extremely unfair,” he said. “We don’t accept it.”
The settlement is currently being rewritten, in part because of opposition from the Justice Department. Marybeth Peters, the top copyright official in the United States, told Congress in September that the settlement could put “diplomatic stress” on the government because it would affect foreign authors whose rights were protected by international treaties. The governments of France and Germany oppose the deal.
A few Chinese authors have suggested that Google has not only scanned in their works, it has published selections of them online without obtaining permission. No such cases could be immediately confirmed, and at least a few authors appeared to be mistaken about whether their books could be viewed.
Ms. Hohne said more than fifty Chinese publishers had allowed parts of 60,000 books to be read online at books.google.cn. Typically, publishers have agreed to allow Google to show about twenty percent of the book and link to sites where readers can buy it, she said.

Rico says it's a legal quagmire, and he hopes Google can find its way out...