In addition, other publishers and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers have written Google with concerns and questions about the print project. Five other European nations including Germany, Hungary, Italy and Spain eventually joined Chirac in asking for financial support from the European Union for the cause. The project recently put French President Jacques Chirac on the defensive, calling for a digital library project that preserves the authority of European languages in one archive. Since its introduction, Google Print has caused great excitement and some aversion. Google's Rodriguez said that the company encourages all publishers to contact it directly with comments and questions. "They may all be nice guys and have wonderful plans, but there's something here we have to have a serious conversation about," Givler said, adding that the financial health of scholarly publishers is at stake. Fair use in the act of digitizing books has not been tested on such a massive scale, he said, and if a court would favor Google, then those rights would be granted to any search engine.
"Although we believe there are many business advantages for publishers to participate in Google Print, they may opt out, and their books scanned in libraries will not be displayed to Google users," she said.ĭespite that claim, Givler questions Google's right to digitize the entirety of copyrighted works in the first place, even if publishers can opt out after the fact. Google representative Eileen Rodriguez said Tuesday that the company respects the rights of copyright holders and that Google Print "incorporates several ways to view books to protect copyright." Those include displaying only bibliographic information and a few short sentences of text for books still in copyright, she said. There are fundamental questions about copyright that need to be answered." "If the fair use is not valid, it could be a gigantic copyright violation.
"The fact is Google Print for Libraries appears to be built on a gigantic fair use claim, which we think is questionable at best," said Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses.
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In the letter, the association posed a series of detailed questions to Google about the project and its scope, given that the company is making a copy of books still in copyright without explicit permission from each publisher, creating the potential for financial harm to its members. The Association of American University Presses, a 125-member nonprofit of scholarly publishers, made public this week a six-page letter sent to Google, whose Google Print for Libraries launched in December with the support of Harvard, Stanford and Michigan university libraries. Despite initial awe for Google's project to digitize and make library books searchable online, some publishers are now criticizing the plan, calling it a "broad-sweeping violation of the Copyright Act."
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