Google's Digital Library Plans Under Attack

Back in December, I wrote about Google's ambitious plan scan to scan and digitize the books in the world's largest libraries including nearly all the 8 million books in Stanford's collection and the 7 million at the University of Michigan...as well as the New York Public Library and libraries at Harvard and Oxford.

However, this idea and plan has been denounced by a group of academic publishers who complain that the project may violate copyright laws and hurt book sales. In a letter to Google, Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, called Google Print for Libraries a "broad-sweeping violation of the Copyright Act" and questioned the search leader's right to digitize the entirety of copyrighted works.

It doesn't matters, said Givler, that materials that are not out of copyright will not be full-text viewable (they will be full-text searchable). "The fact is Google Print for Libraries appears to be built on a gigantic fair use claim, which we think is questionable at best," Givler wrote. "If the fair use is not valid, it could be a gigantic copyright violation. ... Google's claim that it is fair use to make copies of every copyrighted work in even one major library, let alone three of them, is completely unprecedented in scale; it is tantamount to saying that Google can make copies of every copyrighted work ever published, period. Courts have never recognized a fair use claim of that magnitude."

The association is hardly the first organization to object to Google Print. Back in March, Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, an international association of more than 300 not-for-profit publishers, registered the same complaint.

"The law does not permit wholesale copying (which is what digitization is) by a commercial organization of works that are still in copyright," she told The Harvard Crimson. "It is also illegal to make those works available digitally once they have been copied."

This is such a wonderful plan that I hate to see it attacked and perhaps even shut down. Sometimes life seems to be full of disillusionment. But of course, we live in an age of full blown greed.