"In the publishing trade, our primary concern has been the effect which misuses of this universal technology may have on publishers' own legitimate sales and licensing. It is not easy to invest in publishing an author's original work for a fair market price if someone else is copying it worldwide (without consent) for nothing," wrote Hugh Jones, copyright counsel for the Publishers Association.
Google are working with libraries to scan in millions of books and convert the scanned pages into text they can index. Using Google Book Search users can then search the full text of millions of books and get back a list of matches for their search terms. Google argues that the reading of samples of copyrighted books is covered by 'fair dealing' (use of content you can make without permission, also known as 'fair use' in the US) provisions. This is the same provision that the BBC rely on for reporting current events. Fair dealing is a difficult issue to determine and if the text is used solely for organising and indexing then the value the books are, if anything, increased by Google linking to them.
However, books in copyright cannot be copied or stored without the publisher's permission. Publishers and libraries are querying the legality of scanning texts without the author's consent and Google's opt-out policy rather than an opt-in policy for authors is not seen as a big enough step to appease critics. In October 2005 five major book publishers filed a US lawsuit to block Google's plan to scan books from five of the world's libraries; Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and Michigan and the New York Public Library.
A finding against Google could have an impact on the current legal basis of search engines which work by copying web pages into a database to create an up-to-date index of other people's content:
"Books scanned by Google will be searchable only through Google. That's different from anything going on in web searching today: at the moment, I can use any of a number of search engines to access the same full range of content. Google would be creating proprietary content (with creative works it doesn't own and doesn't pay for), not making it free to all. Is this really in the public interest?"
So argues Karen Christensen CEO of Berkshire Publishing Group.
While Google is undergoing litigation in the US, The Open Content Alliance, backed by Yahoo and Microsoft, has plans to digitally duplicate 150,000 old books over the next year. Harper Collins announced plans in December 2003 to create a digital library of its own books and audio content and Project Gutenberg, founded in 1971, is continuing to create a collection of books (whose copyright had expired) that are free to download. This competition must alleviate concerns that Google would have a monopoly on a digital library.
But is Google truly disrupting the normal fortunes of authors and publishers by providing a searchable index of their books? Surely the biggest threat is a social shift from books to other forms of online entertainment and the fact that the books could be invisible to people who get all their information from the Internet.
