Google has been hit with a lawsuit for copyright infringement, stemming from its effort to scan several library's worth of books to make them searchable online. It had offered authors an "opt-out" option.

Here's some more detail from Bill Rosenblatt's DRM Watch.

I will venture a prediction: I expect this one will settle.

My first thought is that the publicity that they would get from being part of a readily searchable library would be good opportunity for some obscure authors (that is why I expect it will settle). (Personally, I would be content to have the books that I have edited included). (In a very limited sense we already have searchable libraries; I use Amazon's book search function that way. It doesn't post the text but in a lot of cases one can get a general sense of the book's content from reviews). But for popular works, or works where the authors actually expect to derive income from sales, well, Google's project wouldn't be so welcome. And for art books with color illustrations or photographs, well, the publishers would in general not be so pleased. Graphics cost a LOT to print.

If Google were displaying the entire work online in a printable format, then that would be problematic. But the plan so far seems to be to just display snippets and title information. So the "copy" that is being made is just for searching purposes. Where that stands in copyright law remains to be seen.

But one more complication... colleague Patrick's actual tests of the "Google Print" service seem to be turning up entire books. That service works by permission, which is fine, but if their library project is going to work the same way, we are back to problematic.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 8:09 AM | Books

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