Public Agenda (Accra)
27 February 2009
The Pan African Writers' Association (PAWA), as part of fulfilling its mandate to safeguard the intellectual property rights of African Writers, has mounted a campaign to alert all African writers and publishers on a recent groundbreaking settlement of $125m (one hundred and twenty-five million US Dollars) reached with Google over the digitization and show of in-copyright books.
The settlement was reached in class action brought on behalf of a broad class of authors, publishers, and the United States of America Copyright holders worldwide against search engine superpowers, Google.
The lawsuit challenged Google's plan to among others, share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owners.
The agreement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works.
Again, the agreement will provide more access to out-of-print books, additional ways to purchase copyright books, institutional subscriptions to millions of books online, and compensation to authors and publishers and control over access to their works.
In order to benefit from this $125m settlement arising out of the class action, African writers and publishers are to indicate urgently whether or not they will join the class action. They are to visit the PAWA website on www.panafricanwritersassociation.or for more information from the full document which is in five (5) languages - English, French, Swahili, Arabic and Portuguese.
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