Published in Pop + Politics dot com, November 15, 2005

Somewhere Demetrius Phalereus is smiling.

Google recently announced its initiative to digitize the collections of some of the leading libraries in the world, including the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, The New York Public Library, and the University of Oxford for the public to search online for free. Google Library will allow anyone with an Internet connection to search via keywords, similar to their web search, the contents of all books in its repository. The results will return a relevant snippet of a copyrighted work or the entire page of those in the public domain, a link to where the book can be purchased, and the corresponding bibliographical and metadata.

Separately, Google has created Google Publisher, an opt-in program for publishers to submit books they voluntarily wish to be scanned and searchable. These two projects, collectively titled Google Print and with an estimated cost of $150 million dollars, aim to make the company money by advertising sales from search result pages, again similar to their web search.

Google Print is poised to completely revolutionize how we search for information, but unfortunately, the Google Library project has hit two legal speed bumps by way of the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP). In their cases filed before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, both associations claim that Google’s aim to digitize entire works constitutes massive copyright infringement and they are seeking an injunction against the scanning of copyrighted works.

“This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law," Nick Taylor, president of the New York-based Authors Guild, said in a statement. "It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied."

The Google Print concept is not new. There are many book repositories online today, including the Internet Archive. What makes Google Print so exciting -- and controversial -- is the scope of the project. It is a massive, centralized card catalog, instantly searchable to anyone with an Internet connection, providing one of the key tools to the information age. What the Author’s Guild and the AAP seem to miss is the potential for Google Print to help their bottom line by directing users to a link where they can purchase books that turn up in the search.

With regard to claims of copyright violations, Google has explicitly stated that they do not intend to display an entire page from a copyrighted work, let alone its entire contents. For books under copyright, Google will show only snippets, a few sentences containing the search term. Moreover, Google claims a fair-use right to displaying snippets, along the lines of book reviewers and authors in their use of quotations in published works.

The Author’s Guild and AAP's second copyright claim, that in order to create a cataloging system, Google must keep the entire digitized work and hence, violate copyright, wishes to dismantle the existence of the Internet as a whole. By their definition, and applied broadly to the world wide web, their claim would net as copyright infringers Google’s web search -- which uses crawlers to catalog entire websites -- and ISPs that make full-text copies when passing along browser requests.

The Author’s Guild and the AAP also believe they are owed a percentage of the revenue from ad sales as a result of the Google Print search. As Tim O’Reilly , founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc, points out, “We have never given real property owners the right to 'opt out' of any mechanism that helps people find their property -- maps.” And the fact that Google will make money off of those search tools, much like map sellers, does not give the copyright holder any right to those potential revenues nor a right to prevent the tool’s existence.

Google Print will inevitably increase the coffers of the authors and publishers. With thousands of books languishing in obscurity, Google Print will bring those books into readers' hands. What’s more, Google Print will provide a wealth of information regarding reading and search habits, a goldmine for authors and publishers looking to sell or market new books. Surely, Demetrius Phalereus would have been proud: his Library of Alexandria is one step closer to fruition.