The battle between publishers and Google over the Internet-search company's project to digitize library books has heated up with an announcement this month by Google that it was starting a campaign to dispel misperceptions about the project. In an e-mail message posted online and addressed to "Google Book Search supporters," two Google officials said they were creating a "fact-checking brigade" about the company's digitization effort. And they proceeded to rip apart a column in Newsday by the writer Susan Cheever, in which she accused Google of stealing authors' works....Google says its project is permissible under copyright law's "fair use" exemption. But Ms. Cheever disputes the point in her column, stating that fair use allows people to distribute only a set amount of words from a work. "The amount of words that constitute fair use varies according to court case," she writes. "At present, it is 400 words." Taking aim at that statement, Alexander Macgillivray, a Google lawyer, and Jen Grant, a marketing manager for the company, say Ms. Cheever "fundamentally misstates copyright law and misleads readers about Google Book Search." The Google employees say that there is no word limit associated with fair use and that some courts have ruled that republishing an entire work is fair use. They made the statement in a February e-mail message to supporters of the Google project. The message also urges people to "help clear the air when misleading articles like this one are published."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/23/2006 12:39:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
