Authors Guild vs. Google Print Finally Hits Fan
The Authors Guild's going to court to stop the Google Print initiative. Susan Wojcicki, Google's VP of Product Management, wrote about the lawsuit on the Google blog yesterday making clear Google's position:

"Google doesn’t show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program (unless the copyright holder gives us permission to show more). At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries."

A potentially massive increase in sales didn't convince the Authors Guild though.

Guild president Nick Taylor wrote in a press release “it's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.”

Which I can kind of understand... it's like Google barging into paid content sites, copying everything into their index and then only showing small portions of that content for searches? Though most paid content sites would welcome the extra traffic that such a service would provide.

I think Google may lose this one: though what they display in results is within fair use they have to copy the entire book into their index to do it. That's copying without permission and is what will sink Google Print as it currently stands.

Danny wrote however that "InternetWeek has legal experts saying that copyright law over indexing books appears to be on Google's side."

Here's his most recent and excellent coverage on the suit.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |