The Guild had sued Google in September 2005, after Google struck deals with major university libraries to scan and copy millions of books in their collections. Many of these were older books in the public domain, but millions of others were still under copyright protection. Nick Taylor, then the president of the Guild, saw Google’s scanning as “a plain and brazen violation of copyright law.” Google countered that its digitizing of these books represented a “fair use” of the material. Our position was: The hell you say. Summary of Google Settlement Outcome, and a list of the Author's Guild members involved. |
Today we learned that the Authors Guild filed a lawsuit to try to stop Google Print. We regret that this group chose to sue us over a program that will make millions of books more discoverable to the world -- especially since any copyright holder can exclude their books from the program. What’s more, many of Google Print’s chief beneficiaries will be authors whose backlist, out of print and lightly marketed new titles will be suggested to countless readers who wouldn’t have found them otherwise. Google respects copyright. The use we make of all the books we scan through the Library Project is fully consistent with both the fair use doctrine under U.S. copyright law and the principles underlying copyright law itself, which allow everything from parodies to excerpts in book reviews. (Here's an article by one of the many legal scholars who have weighed in on Google Print.) From The Official Google Blog, 9/20/2005 |
The Supreme Court decision in the case of the New York Times v. Jonathan Tasini, et al. affected the content available in our online databases.
"Reproduction of freelance authors' magazine and newspaper articles in computer databases, without authors' permission, held to infringe authors' copyrights and not to be privileged under 17 USCS 201(c)".
Here's an overview of the issues and the implications of the decision from Cornell University Law School.
Copyright law has an effect on these areas of the work we do at the library:
Copyright Law also has an effect on what your professors do.