Page 179 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Google Book Search

ThE CoPyrighT DEBaTE
At the time of writing, Google Book Search has deals in place to acquire
content from the libraries of Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford
University, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library, hence
promising one-stop shopping for students, academics, or average folks seeking
to gather information on virtually any topic. Though widely heralded in the
media as a potential achievement of epic proportions, authors and publishers
became concerned that freely available online books would hurt sales of their
physical counterparts. In turn, they invoked copyright law to sue Google and
stop its scanning program.
Google argues that its program is not designed so that site visitors will “be
able to read copyright books through Google Book Search.” Instead, “the purpose
of this program is to help you discover books. That’s a very different thing than
saying that this is a substitute for actually buying the books and reading them. In
fact, we are looking to direct you, once you’ve discovered that book, to the place
you can find it” (“The Battle over Books: Authors and Publishers Take on the
Google Print Library Project,” 2005).
The president of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), Patricia
Schroeder, notes that, “the bottom line is that under its current plan Google is
seeking to make millions of dollars by freeloading on the talent and property of
authors and publishers” (Wray and Milmo 2006). Allan Adler of the AAP fur-
ther argues that if Google is “going to directly promote it[self] through the use
of valuable content [and] intellectual property created by others, those others at
least should have the right to have permission asked, if not also to share in a bit
of the revenue” (“The Battle over Books,” 2005).
Under the program’s current design, user searches that return works under
copyright offer bibliographic data about the book as well as a few sentences of
text—or “snippets” as Google deems them. Books no longer under copyright
(meaning those over 75 years old) are available in their entirety. Google believes
that if anything, they are providing a service that will bring light to millions of
“orphaned” books that have been languishing in libraries unseen for years. As
Google’s lawyer David Drummond states, “We’ve designed the service to be a
fair use one, to be a service that promotes a significant public good that spurs
creativity in the society and in the world, and one that does not harm publishers
or authors” (“The Battle over Books,” 2005).

why is googLE Doing This?
Google cofounder Sergey Brin once proclaimed that, “The perfect search
engine would be like the mind of God. The mind of God, one might imagine,
probably features everything that human beings have ever written, recorded,
photographed, videotaped, linked, or designed. Thus, it makes sense that the
content of every library would be necessary fodder for ‘the perfect search en-
gine’ ” (Vaidhyanathan 2005, p. B7).