Publishers Vs Google Print

Five major publishing firms filed suit against Google Inc to stop the company from creating a digital index of millions of copyrighted books. The Lawsuit, coming after a group of book authors also sued Google, sets up a legal showdown over the limits of intellectual property law in the age of global computer networks. The publishers are trying to halt the Google Print Library Project. The project aims to make digital copies of millions of books stored in the libraries of major universities, including Harvard. Google will then use its search technology to create an index of all of the text in each book, and make this index available on the Internet at no charge. The result would be the world's largest and most powerful index of books. A user could instantly search millions of volumes for information on a particular topic, and receive a list of relevant books. The index would also display small portions of the text, to help a researcher decide if he or she has found the right book.The publishers accuse Google of trying to profit by "massive, wholesale, and systematic copying of entire books still protected by copyright." They say that Google hopes the service will attract lots of new users to its website, thus allowing the company to increase its advertising revenue. In response to the lawsuit, Google argued that an online index of books amounts of "fair use," a legal concept that allows the reproduction of small portions of copyrighted works. Eric Schmidt makes a spirited defense of the move. The Google Print Library Project website said that publishers who don't want their work included in the index can contact Google and ask for the removal of individual titles. From a legal perspective, the case appears to be tossup, with good arguments on both sides. In their lawsuit against Google, the book publishers cite Yahoo's program as an acceptable alternative where they cite that Yahoo works directly with the owners of content to make that content available. Yahoo said that it would begin offering its index of books by year's end, and have about 18,000 books available by the end of 2006.I think that the technology movement fired up by Google is unstoppable - the book publishers may appear concerned - but this should only make book writing, publishing and perhaps digitizing published material more and more attractive.