Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net), and other international copyright experts joined together today to launch Copyright Watch — a public website created to centralize resources on national copyright laws at www.copyright-watch.org. . .

. . . Copyright Watch is the first comprehensive and up-to-date online repository of national copyright laws. To find links to national and regional copyright laws, users can choose a continent or search using a country name. The site will be updated over time to include proposed amendments to laws, as well as commentary and context from national copyright experts. Copyright Watch will help document how legislators around the world are coping with the challenges of new technology and new business models.

Web portal Google Books’ initiative to create a digital library by scanning printed publications has triggered alarm bells in India, forcing the Centre to take up the matter with the US government. In a meeting held in the last week of October here, senior Indian officials told their US counterparts that the portal would encroach upon the copyrights of Indian authors and publishers.

Shortly before midnight last night, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers released a revised version (PDF) of the Google Book Search Settlement, with some clear concessions to foreign rightsholders (as noted by Publishers Weekly), a vague—and, to critics, fatally inadequate—concession on orphan works. There was also no response to library concerns about pricing of the potentially monopolistic institutional database—an issue that Google representatives say can’t be addressed in the settlement.

The one notable response to criticisms from the library community was an agreement that, as Google representatives had already stated, more than one free public access terminal per library building may be authorized.

Redline version of the Amended Settlement Agreement

Late Friday night the parties to the Google Book Search class action submitted a revised settlement agreement to the federal court in New York that is hearing the case.

Unfortunately, the parties did not add any reader privacy protections. The only nominal change was that they formally confirmed a position they had long taken privately that information will not be freely shared between Google and the Registry.

The changes we’ve made in our amended agreement address many of the concerns we’ve heard (particularly in limiting its international scope), while at the same time preserving the core benefits of the original agreement: opening access to millions of books while providing rightsholders with ways to sell and control their work online. You can read a summary of the changes we made here, or by reading our FAQ.

. . . We may be watching a sequel to the DMCA story today. An international copyright agreement, negotiated under unusual secrecy, could impose a further round of restrictions on our use of digital technology.

This Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, represents an attempt by the United States and other countries to set common rules for violations of intellectual-property laws. The United States hopes to use ACTA to export its laws, but in the process it might have to import others.

After months of often bitter debate, European Union lawmakers reached agreement on how to preserve citizen’s rights to Internet access in a meeting that ended in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The issue, which pits citizens’ civil liberties against the rights of content owners such as record and movie companies to protect creative works on the Internet, has blocked the passage of a wide range of laws collectively dubbed the telecoms package. . .

. . . The text of the telecoms package now contains a new Internet freedom provision that states that access to the Internet is a human right of every E.U. citizen, and that if authorities take away that right people must have the opportunity to defend themselves; citizens also have an automatic right to mount a legal challenge.

However, the text does not demand that authorities in the 27 countries of the E.U. obtain a court order before cutting off someone’s Internet connection, as the European Parliament demanded when it last voted on the issue in early summer.

Who knew there was so much fight in those dusty books? When Google announced plans in 2004 to scan millions of tomes tucked into library stacks across the country, admirers embraced the ambitious project as a digital undertaking as visionary as Magellan’s setting sail around the world. The project would throw open musty archives everywhere, putting hidden works on the Internet for all to use.

How things change. The library project is now embroiled in a ferocious legal free-for-all spanning the globe. At the battle’s heart is Google’s year-old settlement with groups representing authors and publishers who sued the company over its plans to digitize and copy books. In response to complaints by the settlement’s many opponents, a federal judge in New York has asked Google to revise the settlement by Nov. 9. After that, opponents and the Department of Justice (DOJ) will carefully scrutinize the new deal.

The case presents a tangle of issues: how to create new markets for old books without shortchanging authors; how to nurture new technology without stifling competition; and how to preserve all that when one company — in this case, Google — is pioneering the revolution and could profit handsomely. One commentator, who supports the original settlement, has called it “the World Series of antitrust.”

Like many others, the Open Book Alliance awaits the release on November 9 of a revised proposed settlement from Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.  If repeated signals from Google and its partners over the last month are to be taken at face value, we don’t expect significant changes to the earlier settlement proposal that was soundly rejected by the Department of Justice and many others. “Settlement 2.0” is an opportunity to for Google and its partners to make things right, and help bring about the mass digitization of books in a way that embraces openness, competition and the public good.

The Open Book Alliance is issuing the following baseline requirements that the new settlement proposal must meet if it is to achieve those critical objectives.  These requirements reflect the collective expression of concerns by the U.S. Department of Justice, authors, publishers, academics, libraries, foreign nations, state Attorneys General, consumer advocacy groups, and many others, and thus we think it appropriate to review the revised settlement within this framework.

Will the Google Book Search settlement agreement have changed much when it’s unveiled in federal court on November 9? The Open Book Alliance (OBA), which includes industry heavyweights like Microsoft and Amazon, the Internet Archive, and the New York Library Association and SLA, has issued a caution about the settlement document expected.