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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

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    EU sets hearing over Google books deal

    BRUSSELS
    Mon Jul 20, 2009 11:38am EDT
    A woman stands among the bookshelves in the main reading room of The New York Public Library, December 14, 2004. The European Commission is to hold a hearing on September 7 for interested parties to comment on Google's deal with publishers to make millions of books available online and its impact on EU writers' rights. REUTERS/Mike Segar

    BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission is to hold a hearing on September 7 for interested parties to comment on Google's deal with publishers to make millions of books available online and its impact on EU writers' rights.

    Technology  |  France

    "Participants were invited to it three weeks ago," Commission spokesman Oliver Drewes said on Monday of the September 7 hearing.

    The European Union executive had said in May it would study Google's book deal after Germany complained the company had scanned books from U.S. libraries to create its Google Books database without prior consent of rights holders.

    Britain and France also backed Germany.

    In a deal with the Authors Guild and the Association of American publishers last October, Google agreed to pay $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers can register works and be compensated from institutional subscriptions or book sales.

    The U.S. Justice Department is now looking into this settlement.

    (Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Dan Lalor)
    Technology
    France


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