Open Access News

In their complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the [five publishers] charged that Google is infringing copyright to "further its own commercial purposes." The publishers asked the court to forbid Google to reproduce their works and to require Google to delete or destroy records already scanned. The only remuneration the publishers seek is that Google pay their legal fees....David Drummond, Google's vice president for corporate development, released a statement denouncing the lawsuit as "shortsighted." He said it "works counter to the interests of not just the world's readers, but also the world's authors and publishers." He said that Google's project falls under copyright law's fair-use provision, that it would make books easier to find and buy, and that it would inevitably "increase the awareness and sales of books directly benefiting copyright holders." Patricia S. Schroeder, president of the publishers' group, said that publishers had been taken aback when Google announced its library-scanning project late last year. She said the publishers had held meetings with Google, in the spring and through the summer, repeatedly asking the company not to scan books under copyright. For a while this summer, Google stopped scanning copyrighted books while the negotiations were going on. But then Google announced that it would resume scanning books under copyright [on November 1]. "We don't seem to be able to get their attention," Ms. Schroeder said. "Instead, we get, 'This is for the global good,' and, 'This will be good for you, but you just don't get it.' We seemed to be talking past each other." "The real fear is that if Google can do this, anyone can do this," she added. "The precedent is just terrifying." Asked why the publishers did not also sue any of the universities involved, many of which are discussed in the complaint, Ms. Schroeder said: "Google is clearly the instigator. They are the driving force behind this." James L. Hilton, interim university librarian and associate provost for academic-, information-, and instructional-technology affairs at the University of Michigan [one of libraries letting Google scan its books], said he was disappointed by the lawsuit. "We believe that this project has enormous benefit for humanity" in allowing people to search entire texts of obscure and long-out-of-print works through a computer, he said in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon from the Educause conference, in Orlando, Fla...."From a public-policy standpoint," he added, "I think it would be very unfortunate if a judge decided to shut this down."