Publishers join forces to sue Google
PrintIt's what all the cool kids are doing
Posted in Music and Media, 20th October 2005 10:30 GMT
Free whitepaper – Dell/EMC CX4 and Dell PowerEdge blades
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is suing Google over its plans to make scans of millions of books available online. Google announced earlier this year that it would digitise and index the content of five major libraries, and make the content searchable.
The publishing group says Google's Print Library project will infringe their copyrights, but adds that it is not seeking damages, only legal costs. The complaint was filed, yesterday, in the US District court in New York by Penguin Group USA, McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons,
For its part, Google says the lawsuit is "shortsighted", according to the BBC. It argues that its plans, which will not make full texts available online, amount to little more than a catalogue of the books in question. According to Business Week the company says its plans are entirely legal because copyright law allows for reproduction for research purposes.
Copyright owners can ask Google not to include their works, provided they do so by the beginning of November. But the AAP says this is not enough, and has asked the New York court to issue an injunction stopping the process, on the grounds that its members will suffer "continuing, irreparable and imminent harm".
In September, the Authors Guild and a former US poet Laureate joined forces to sue the search company over the same issue.
Authors Guild president Nick Taylor described Google's actions as "a plain and brazen violation of copyright law". He argued that the authors are the only people who should be able to decide what happens to the works, and that it was not a decision Google should be making. ®
Free whitepaper – Fundamental Principles of Air Conditioners for Information Technology
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Managing desktop software for fun and profit
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Enabling the Agile Data Center
Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers?
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Fedora 12 polishes Linux for netbooks
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter