The German Cabinet agreed Wednesday to a plan that would fund the digitization of books, pictures, sculptures, notes, music and films and make them available on the Internet. Culture Minister Bernd Neumann called the project a "quantum leap into the world of digital information.
The project, called the German Digital Library (DDB), would go online in 2011 and play a major role in the preservation of Germany's cultural identity, Neumann added. Initial funding of 5 million euros ($7.6 million) as well as annual costs of 2.6 million euros will come from a German economic bail-out program and be split by the federal and state governments.
The German project is a response to the Google Book Search program, which the German government opposed, saying it lacked sufficient protections for copyright holders.
"The German Digital Library is a reasonable response to Google," Neumann said, adding that the German project would first seek copyright holders' approval before digitizing a work, rather than following Google's strategy of allowing copyright holders to have their works removed from the database after being digitized.
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