Google Books

History

In 1998 co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched the now internationally used search engine, Google. However, what is perhaps lesser known is that around these years Page and Brin were working on another project known as "Google Print" or now called Google Books. This project, which was supported by the Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project, had the goal of getting digital libraries to work. The much bigger and ambitious goal of this project however, was to digitize copies of every single published book.

Google Books set out to make various agreements with research libraries such as, Stanford, Harvard and Oxford. After having digitized the libraries work, Google in return, gave them access to the copies made, thus completing the goal Google Books set out to do.

Issues

While Google Books can be seen as having a beneficial and groundbreaking influence in the publishing industry, there are various issues and concerns which this project has faced throughout the years. One of these issues was copyrights and the recognition of publishers and authors of the original work.

Copyright is the legal protection of an authors original work or property which begins the moment the original work is created or fixed. This applies to all forms of orginal work such as writing, music, art, and much more. The goal of Google Books which is to digitize all published work thus infringes on copyright, in which a published works copyright status is disregarded.

This concern of copyrights can be seen in the, nearly a decade long case (2005-2015) of the Authors Guild versus Google Books. This case primarily focused on Google Books scanning of various collections of books from libraries. These particular scans were made available in searchable database where the public could search through particular terms of the texts which would result in short pieces from the text appearing in the search results. It is important to note however, the public could not access the full test but just these small snippets. This directly lead to the Author Guild along with various individual authors, sued Google, saying that the displaying and scanning of these texts, which only included parts of the original text, infringed upon copyright laws.

After almost a decade, the court ultimately ruled in favor of Google Books. Google Books work was considered transformative and therefore can be considered as fair use, which is what eventually lead to their win. The scanning of texts was considered transformative because it was service which publicized information and thus providing knowledge to the public while simultaneously not replacing the original work but providing information about it. Furthermore, Google Books provided information about the original work which would allow users, if they desired, to purchase the original work or access the full text.

Though Google Books scanning and displaying of snippets of original work directly falls under fair use, many authors and organizations continue to question their work. If the original work is not altered or edited and solely scanned along with information about the authors and publishers, is there an infringement on copyright? Does the scanning of all published works disregard the copyright status? Though Google Books remains to be used and accessed internationally, these questions are continuously asked, leading to doubts and various lawsuits and cases against Google Books.