Google Books suffers a first setback: a judge in America has blocked the project even before it really took shape.
Google has been working for months on the project Google Books, a large online library with the ambition to make a myriad of books available to users. If the negotiations with publishers have progressed and yielded decent results (we recall that even in Italy there was talk of Google Books, with the agreement with Mondadori), the Mountain View giant has today however had to slow down the advancement of the project due to a ruling by an American judge.Mountain View has today however had to slow down the advancement of the project due to a ruling by an American judge.
The New York court has indeed established that Google Books would take, compared to competitors, too significant an advantage in the publishing market.
Moreover, notwithstanding the happy agreement with publishers of the considerable sum of 125 million euros, the issue related to the so-called orphan works, that is those works for which it is not clear to whom author royalties should be paid, would remain open.
Therefore, with the intention of protecting and regulating such situations for which perhaps the obstacle of paying royalties would have been bypassed, Judge Chin blocked the aforementioned agreement between Google and the publishers, while recognizing that the idea behind the Google Books project is worthwhile: knowledge is a good to spread and therefore digitizing millions of texts represents an unquestionable advantage for all humanity.
The scenario that opens, then, is the theorization of a new balance between Google’s voracious omniscience and the legitimate interests of all parties involved, even those unaware, so to speak.
For Google, obviously, the project must continue as it is an agreement with truly significant potential. Meanwhile, this ruling from an American court provides support to Amazon, Microsoft and the various European publishers opposed to Google’s expansionist ambitions in the book sector.

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