Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Google's new search engine of books puts a world of knowledge at our fingertips. Publishers say the Internet giant is robbing them of their rightful fees. Maybe it's time to call copyright laws history.
Nov 9, 2005 | Just the announcement last December elicited a thrill. Google, the young oracle that brought order and sense to the World Wide Web, now planned to take on the printed word, reaching into major university libraries to scan and digitize all the knowledge contained in books. The company promised to make every printed book as accessible as a Web site, allowing anyone with Internet access to search through every page on every book for any particular word or phrase. Google had signed deals allowing it to scan millions of books at Stanford, the University of Michigan, Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library. So ambitious was the effort that its only real analogues were the stuff of legend and fiction: the lost library at Alexandria and Jorge Luis Borges' fantastical Library of Babel. On hearing of Google's effort, one librarian told the New York Times, ''Our world is about to change in a big, big way."
A year later, Google's grand plan to digitize the world's books still seems as fantastical as it did when it was first proposed. Earlier this year, the company started scanning books at libraries, and on Nov. 3 launched an elegant beta version of its book search engine -- but the project faces an uncertain future.
At issue is copyright law: Does Google have the legal right to copy library books and make them searchable online? Trade groups for authors and publishers say no. In September, the Authors Guild, a professional society of more than 8,000 writers, filed suit against Google to stop the scanning project; in October, the Association of American Publishers, which represents large publishing houses, also sued. Both groups charge that Google, which does not plan to ask authors and publishers for permission before it scans their books, would engage in massive copyright infringement -- and also cost the book industry a great deal of potential revenues -- if it goes ahead with its effort.
Google insists that its project is legal, as it would only offer snippets -- one or two sentences -- of copyrighted works that publishers had not given the company permission to scan. It also argues that its plan would boost, not reduce, book sales, and would be a boon to the book industry. But its quest to bring books to the Web now looks certain to spark a major courtroom battle, and it's a battle that Google, however deep its pockets and well-remunerated its lawyers, is not guaranteed to win.
"One of the great things about this conflict is it points out the absurdity of American copyright law," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar and copyright expert at New York University. Vaidhyanathan believes that what Google wants to do may well be illegal under today's copyright regime. At the same time, he notes that Google can't really create a system that relies on publishers' granting permission to digitize their books, namely because nobody really knows who owns the rights to all the books in the library. So, Vaidhyanathan says, Google is stuck; scanning books without asking permission may be illegal, and scanning books after asking permission is impractical to the point of impossibility.
But if copyright law stands in the way of Google's grand aim, isn't it time we thought about changing the law? That's the most salient question raised in the fight over Google's effort to build a digital library. The company -- and the host of other firms that will surely follow in its path -- is poised to create a tool that could truly change the way we understand, and learn about, the world around us. A loss for Google would echo throughout the tech industry, dictating not just how we use technology to improve books but also how other media -- movies, music, TV shows and even Web pages -- are indexed online. Can we really afford to let content owners stand in the way of Google's revolutionary idea?
