Opponents' Position
The existence of Google Books has been justified in many ways; however it has triggered multiple lawsuits against it and has elicited concerns from the general public regarding its potential influence. The major reasons for opposition to Google Books are its tendency to impede innovation from authors, its ability to change user behavior illegitimately, its misleading interpretation for the industry’s definition of the term “fair use,” and its questionably policy to protect user privacy.
Innovation Impediment
Most authors rely heavily on the copyright benefit they receive from their creations. These benefits have proven sustainable with publishers and paper-based books, yet the model has been challenged by the existence of Google Books. In American author Ursula K. Le Guin’s petition against Google Books, she emphasized the importance of authors’ control of their own work when it comes to copyright, which would be taken by Google if they agreed with Google Book’s terms. This petition has been signed by almost 300 authors by January, 2010.
User Behavior
Google Book’s existence could potentially change people’s reading behavior, since it only offers highly segmented previews of books, which cannot capture the beauty of the entire creation. Additionally, viewing books this way does not offer many comments from book critics. As a result users could overlook great books because of the incomplete impression they get from the book preview. At the same time, scholars could be misguided by Google Books if they are rooting their research on Google Books search results. This is because Google Book’s search function would prevent them from reading the relevant section in its entirety and mislead them to draw incorrect conclusions about the text.
Definition of Fair Use
Google has emphasized that its scanning and publicizing of copyright protected material is legal since it falls in the category of "fair use", which is controversial. Google has been using Google Books as a commercial source of revenue generation without the permission for the copyright holders. People have argued that if Google Books is a purely NGO project aiming solely for the public-serving goals advertised by Google, it would be fine. Yet given Google’s profit-driven purpose behind the implementation, it is unlikely that Google’s practices constitute “fair use” of copyright protected materials.
User Privacy
Lastly, Google has never been publicly sound in promising the protection of user privacy. In fact, Professor Pamela Samuelson has argued that the biggest difference between Google and a public library is that Google is likely to use users’ data for business purposes, whereas a public library would do its best to prevent revealing any of its user data. Therefore users of Google Book’s may not be able to count on Google to protect their privacy.