Originally published October 9 2005
Google Print faces lawsuit from Writer's Guild of America
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Charged with illegally copying works without seeking copyright permissions, Google is now involved in a huge legal battle that could give U.S. courts the chance to reinterpret copyright law for application to digital media.
The suit hands the courts a chance to revisit a long-standing principle of copyright law that's increasingly come under pressure thanks to digital technologies.
They can either update copyright law for the better, or side with tradition and hold back innovations that would benefit thousands of writers and millions of readers by rescuing books from obscurity.
Google has deals with academic libraries at Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and the University of Michigan as well as the New York Public Library to digitize major portions of their collections and put them in a searchable database that's accessible over the internet.
Google has not sought permission from copyright holders in advance to do this, but offers anyone affected who so wishes the chance to opt out of the program.
Google argues that it strictly limits how much of any given book it will show to consumers and thus meets copying exemptions provided under the fair-use doctrine, among others.
Courts in the past have been disappointingly strict when it comes to cases involving commercial use of copies without permission, even in cases where companies have made extraordinary efforts to preserve the rights of copyright holders where they presumably count the most -- in the marketplace, where consumers access and use copyright works.
MP3.com, for example, was found liable in 2000 for infringing Universal Music Group's copyrights with its short-lived My.MP3.com digital locker service.
It ultimately settled the case for $54.8 million, pushing its total legal tab for the experiment well north of $100 million, including settlements and licensing deals with other record labels.
"Copyright is not designed to afford consumer protection or convenience but, rather, to protect the copyright holders' property interests," U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote at the time in UMG Recordings Inc. v. MP3.com.
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