In a letter to 16 European book publishing companies, the search giant proposed giving two of the eight director positions on its proposed U.S. book registry to non-U.S. representatives, a person close to the company said Monday.
Google paid US$125 million to create the registry which will act as middleman between Google and the publishers and ensure that copyright owners are compensated.
The company also promised not to include European works in the digitizing process in the U.S. without consulting their publishers first.
Resistance to the U.S. deal is strong among some politicians, libraries and publishers, particularly in Germany and France.
Five organizations representing E.U. publishers, libraries, rights holders and businesses active in Internet commerce told the European Commission at a hearing on Monday that the proposed U.S. Google book settlement is unacceptable in its present form, because it would lead to "a de facto monopoly" in the emerging digital books market.
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"We should not let a single U.S. entity dictate an international model of rights recording," said Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive and Open Book Alliance, one of the five organizations.
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The U.S. settlement between Google and U.S. publishers, which is still under scrutiny by a New York court, was the subject of a one-day hearing hosted by the European Commission Monday.
It will be followed Tuesday by a series of one-on-one meetings between Information Commissioner Viviane Reding and, among others, Dan Clancy, Google's top executive responsible for the Books project.
The French government plans to file its objections to Google Inc's (GOOG.O) plan to digitize millions of books in a New York court this week, a French Culture Ministry official said on Monday. "France will send its observations to the U.S. court today or tomorrow," Nicolas Georges, director for books and libraries at the French Culture Ministry, told Reuters on the sidelines of a European Commission hearing on Google's deal with U.S. authors and publisher groups struck earlier this year.
France is concerned about European authors' rights, Georges said.
"There are lots of European works in Google's database. Google can digitalise these works without the permission of European authors," he said.
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