Chinese authors call for revised offer by Google

GOOGLE Inc, which scanned and uploaded books online without permission, should provide a revised compensation plan for writers by the end of this year, a Chinese authors' group said yesterday.

The demand marked the second time in a few days that United States-based companies have come under fire in China for intellectual property violations as Microsoft was found to have violated the IP of a local company on Chinese fonts in Windows.

"Chinese authors should protect their own IP and Google should give us a satisfactory result with a deadline of December 31," the China Written Works Copyright Society said on its Website.

The group demanded that Google provide a full list of books by Chinese authors it has scanned and said it could not scan any more Chinese works without permission.

Under Google's Book Search program, the company has scanned hundreds of thousands of books and placed parts of contents online.

In Google's original settlement plan, it will offer authors who apply for compensation before June 5, 2010 at least US$60 for each book and 63 percent of future revenue from online reading.

Google and US copyright organizations submitted a revised settlement agreement last Saturday to a US court. But it does not apply to China.

Google China was not available for comment.

The Chinese society published an online list of more than 700 authors of 20,000-plus books scanned by Google without their permission.

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