Authors Demand that Google Pay
August 29, 2012
Are authors pulling numbers from thin air? Yahoo News tells us, “Google Should Pay $750 a Book, Say Authors in Copyright Case.” Yes, the authors suing Google argue that the company should be forced to pay $750 per book it copied, distributed, or displayed in its great digitization project. The Reuters article states:
“The authors’ filing was lodged in federal court in the Southern District of New York last month, but was only made public on Friday. In the filing, the Authors Guild, whose president is novelist-lawyer Scott Thurow, urged the court to rule that Google’s digitization project does not constitute ‘fair use’ under copyright law.
“A Google spokeswoman said in an emailed statement: ‘We believe Google Books constitutes fair use by allowing users to identify interesting books and find ways to borrow or buy those books, much like a card catalog for the digital age.'”
Google Books does operate like a card catalog, and its page avows that they only reproduce, in part or in full, works for which they have permission to do so, or those that are out of print or otherwise unavailable “any other way.”
Litigation began not long after the 2004 agreement between Google and a number of libraries, including those at Harvard University, Oxford University andStanford University, to copy millions of tomes. Apparently authors thought they should have a say about the digital availability of their work. Over 20 million books have been scanned since the agreement was made.
Cynthia Murrell, August 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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