Publishers vs Google

The ever-so-popular search engine, Google, lost a little of its gleam the moment they announced their plan to digitize books from selected libraries and universities as part of their Print Library project. Publishers everywhere heavily protested against this mainly because of the fact that their most valuable asset, the copyright, is being infringed (Band 2005). On the other hand, the project clearly stated that users will only be able to see a few sentences and not the full text of a copyrighted material. The question I pose here is whether or not this act should be considered as illegal on Google's part.

I believe that there is a fine line between what is and isn't legal in todays world. Take for example, one of my earlier post 'New forms of media: Youtube' concerning the user's dilemma on what to upload and what not to upload. Jean Hollis Weber (1995) believes that just because an act isn't determined illegal, it is not an excuse for the failure of one's own ethical choices where personal responsibility is concerned. However, in the case stated above, Google was more than willing to respect the request of publishers provided that they list down all the titles that they do not want Google to scan (see Google Blog).

Nonetheless, the Authors Guild did not take this matter lightly. They sued Google for copyright infringement on 20 September 2005 however a clear result is still not apparent.


An example of how the Library Project will look like

Source: http://books.google.com/googlebooks/screenshots.html#fullview


References
Smith, A 2005, Making books easier to find, online, retrieved 12 June 2008, from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/making-books-easier-to-find.html

Band, J 2005, Features - The Authors Guild v. The Google Print Library Project, online, retrieved 12 June 2008, from http://www.llrx.com/features/googleprint.htm

Weber, J 1995, Ethics in scientific and technical communication, online, retrieved 12 June 2008, from http://www.jeanweber.com/newsite/?page_id=22