Google has for the past several months been busy scanning the contents of books, any books, in order to add them to it's indexing engine. But having recently been struck by a publishing industry backlash, this project seems to be in trouble. Not only that, but the very handy Google beta news service, that gathers news stories from thousands of Web sites every day, has just gotten crossways with the Agence France-Presse, the French news agency is claiming damages in the neighborhood of $17.5 million, alleging the search tool is illegally capitalizing on its copyrighted material.
Google tried to appease the publishing world with a plan that called for the copyright holders to opt out of the program, figuring that most would want to be a part of the project. However they were quickly proved wrong, the publishing industry declared that Google turned copyright law "on it's ear" because it threw the burden of notification or authorization of use on the holder, not the user. They also feared that digitizing all this written material would be handy for pirates. They would simply reproduce the works in a physical form and then offer them for sale to the public. They also mentioned in passing that they think Google might make some extra revenue on ads with all this free subject material and so far they haven't been invited to the party, which doesn't set well with the content holders either.
|
The company also is scanning books stored at the New York Public Library and Oxford University, but those two libraries so far are providing Google only with "public domain" works - material no longer protected by copyrights. Google hasn't disclosed how many books it has scanned since it first announced the program eight months ago. The company expects to be scanning books for at least five years - and probably much longer if it can persuade other libraries around the world to participate. |
You can read the AP article in it's entirety here. What do you think?
Is Google out of line in these particular situations? We have to think
a company worth billions has a legal department and surely they would have run this by the staff. If so, how can they be insulated from paying royalties like everyone else? Either way, a lot of folks are going to be suing Google if the Agence France-Presse win their case!
Source: AP
