NEW YORK, NY – The Author’s Guild Inc., along with former New York Times writer Herbert Mitgang, children’s book author Betty Miles, and poet Daniel Hoffman, has filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, accusing Google of “massive copyright infringement.”The lawsuit comes as Google is developing Google Print, which will allow users to search for content in books.
In their lawsuit, the Guild argues that Google should not be allowed to copy books and place them in the public domain for commercial use without permission of the authors in question. While Google does allow copyright holders to exclude and/or remove their works from Google Print, but if authors do not contact Google to have the works removed, then their works would remain in the Google Print index.
Google’s plan to remove works by request, however, runs contrary to the usual way issues of copyrighted materials are handled. Normally, content users and distributors must have affirmative consent from the copyright owner in advance of using copyrighted materials.
“Merely saying that if we don’t hear from you we assume it’s okay has never been accepted by any court, and I doubt it would ever be accepted,” said Terence Ross, a partner and copyright law specialist at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, in Washington, D.C., in an interview with PC World.
The lawsuit asserts that Google knew, or should have known, that copyright laws require advance authorization from copyright owners in order to create and reproduce digital copies for its own commercial use.
“Despite this knowledge, Google has unlawfully reproduced the works and has announced plans to reproduce and display the works without the copyright holders’ authorization,” the Guild states in its lawsuit.
In a statement released by Google, the company stated that it respects copyright, and has taken proper measures to insure that there are no abuses.
“We regret that this group has chosen litigation to try to stop a program that will make books and the information within them more discoverable to the world,” the company said in its statement, and again pointed out that publishers, authors and other copyright owners can exclude books from the Google Print program if they don’t wish to have their works included.
Google has also said it offers protections to copyright holders by limiting users of books covered by copyrights to bibliographic information and a few sentences of text.
Ross, however, does not find Google’s argument legally persuasive, and said that the issue is not whether an entire work is displayed to users; the problem lies in the initial copying of the works themselves.
“It’s not what’s delivered to the PC user that’s the copyright issue, it’s the fact that they have copied the entire work in the first place,” Ross said. “I don’t see fair use.”
Google, on the other hand, prefers the perspective offered in a paper issued by intellectual property lawyer Jonathan Band, in which Band cites cases that are potential relevant to the Google Print situation.
In one instance, Band points out, a company was allowed to make copies of images on its Web sites and offer them in smaller, lower quality form than the original versions, because providing the reduced-quality images did not “alleviate the need” for the superior quality originals.
Google also argues that the Google Print program will not reduce sales potential for authors who are selling their books. On the contrary, Google asserts that the program will boost book sales, because the company plans to direct readers in search of more – be it more works by the same author, or the unabridged version of a work that Google Print only offers an excerpt of – to booksellers and libraries.
“This ability to introduce millions of users to millions of titles can only expand the market for authors’ books, which is precisely what copyright law is intended to foster,” Google’s statement said.
