Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
Google's proposals gave them a quasi-governmental role.
They would have decided for themselves whether publishers or authors had rights over a particular work.
They would have decided they had the rights to sell 'orphan' works, and decided for themselves a rate to pay to a foundation they set up themselves to distribute revenues.
There is a problem with ophan works and copyright, and it should be solved by changes to copyright law, not by large corporations simply announcing that they are going to ignore it for their own benefit.
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Not quite.
They weren't deciding for themselves in some arbitrary way, they had set those terms via negotiations with the Writers' Guild and those terms were embodied in a settlement agreement between Google and the Writers' Guild.
There is a problem with orphan works in the U.S., and Google and the Writers' Guild had attempted to deal with what is effectively a legislative vacuum by coming to a reasonable accommodation. However, the fact that there is a legislative vacuum doesn't necessarily mean that what Google and the Writers' Guild proposed was a contravention of copyright law.