Google Books has been accused of violating copyright laws by The Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Arguments against Google Books focus on the following two principles: Google Books does not get the publisher’s permission to use a book and Google is profiting on a derivative, which is not fair use. Google, on the other hand, argues that it does not need permission because the Google Books Project is fair use.
On Permission
The Google Books Project operates on an opt-out policy; publishers who do not wish to participate only need to explicitly tell Google they do not wish to be part of the project before Google removes their work. Google feels that it is justified in using this policy for two reasons: Google’s web search and image search both operate under the same policy and permission from an author is not needed under fair use. The main dispute is whether or not Google Books truly is fair use.
Argument By Analogy
The argument that Google Books is analogous to Google Image’s is one of many analogous arguments built around former court cases. The court case, Kelly v. Arriba Soft, decided that Arriba Soft was justified in displaying thumbnail transformations of images in its search engine and that it was fair use. Google Images offers the same type of image search service in Google Image Search. When Google compares its image search engine to Google Books, it is making the argument that the Google Book’s project is merely transforming books into snippets that the searcher can use to determine their interest in a book, and is therefore, by their transformation, a fair use. |