The New York Times: Three authors filed suit against Google yesterday contending that the company’s program to create searchable digital copies of the contents of several university libraries constituted “massive copyright infringement.”
The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court in Manhattan, is the first to arise from the Google Print Library program, the fledgling effort aimed at a searchable library of all the world’s printed books.
Google intends to make money from the project by selling advertising on its search pages, much as it does on its popular online search-engine site.
The suit contends that Google knew or should have known that the Copyright Act “required it to obtain authorization from the holders of the copyrights in these literary works before creating and reproducing digital copies of the works for its commercial use and for the use of others.”
Google has said from the beginning that its program is covered by the “fair use” provision of the copyright law, which allows limited use of protected works. In a statement issued in response to the suit, Google also said its program respected copyrights.
Some aspects of the Google Print program have encountered relatively little opposition, particularly one that invites publishers to submit their books to Google for scanning and inclusion in the Google search engine. Most of the large commercial publishing houses have submitted books to Google for scanning, in the hope that the program will lead users to find and buy their books more easily.
