Second Google Suit Over Print Library Project

linumax writes "The Association of American Publishers, an organization of book publishers including Pearson Plc's Penguin unit and McGraw-Hill sued Google over its plan to create a digital Web library of printed books. The Association of American Publishers sued Wednesday after talks broke down with Google over copyright issues raised by the Google Print Library Project. Publishers say Google will infringe copyrights unless it gets advance permission for the scanning. The suit is the second by the publishing industry against Google's library plans and underscores the worries sparked by Google's expansion beyond Web search." From the article: "Google, which is working with five of the world's great libraries (Stanford, Harvard and Michigan university libraries, the New York Public Library and the Bodleian library in Oxford) to digitise their collections, stopped scanning copyrighted books in August after protests from publishers. However, it intends to resume its work next month."

Comments

High and mighty

[ifelse]

It's interesting to note that authors don't really have any say in this affair even when they're in favour of Google Print.

Re:How is this different from a library?

[GreenPhreak]

What no one seems to understand here is that just because Google is scanning all of these books, the end-user can NOT see all of the text of a given book. Unlike the online information that Google indexs, where one can search and then connect to the full webpage of any search hits, the library project will only make available the search quotation and the sentence or so around it for context.

For example, if I were to look up: "JubJub Bird", it would return something like this:

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Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!"
-----------

Now is this giving away the entire contents of this copyrighted work? No. It is merely giving the searcher a hint of where to look for more information. In order to give away all of the information in a copyrighted text, one would have to know exactly what to search in sentence after sentence of that text. So it really isn't giving away anything. It most assuredly isn't giving away more information that Amazon.com does when you can open up the book and look at a few sample pages.

In the same way that Google offers a searchable catalog of online web information, it will now offer a super-catalog search for library contents. I, for one, think that this will be an invaluable resource for anyone who does academic research, or a person who merely wants to know all of the references on a particular subject and relevant resources. Have some forsight, publishers of the world! This will only increase your profits when people purchase relevant texts to their interests.

                                                                              greenphreak

Google's Response

[nmec]

Surprised this wasn't in the article but you can read Google's response from Eric Schmidt here.