Author's Guild Sues Google For Copyright Infringement

Posted on September 21, 2005

The Authors Guild filed suit against Google, Inc. Tuesday in federal court, alleging that Google's ambitious plan to scan all the books ever published into a database without getting permission from the authors of the works constitutes a massive copyright violation. Book publishers have already been fighting the plan in court, but Google says that's it's not going to either a) get permission from the authors or the publishers or b) pay any royalties. After heated negotiations and a flurry of court filings, Google begrudgingly agreed to an "opt-out" provision, e.g., either you opt out of the program or you've been deemed to have given permission to publish your work for free, essentially. If that sounds annoyingly familiar to you, it should. That's the same policy used by spammers. The burden has been shifted to authors and publishers; if they don't want their copyrights infringed, they have to take action.

In August, Mountain View, California-based Google said it planned to temporarily scale back plans to make the full text of copyrighted books available on its Internet site.
Google has said it will respect the wishes of copyright holders who contacted the company and asked for their books to be withheld from the project. Meanwhile, it said it was working with publishers and librarians to scan books in the public domain that are not covered by copyright.
Critics of the program said that Google's plan to allow copyright holders to opt out of the project switches the burden of upholding copyright from infringers to copyright holders.
"This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law," Nick Taylor, president of the 8,000-member New York-based Authors Guild, said in a statement on Tuesday. [Authors], not Google, have the exclusive rights to ... authorize such reproduction, distribution and display of their works," the complaint said.

The entire program is absolutely outrageous and will take money out of the pockets of authors, most of whom don't make that much money. The court needs to slap Google down -- hard. Otherwise, copyright protections for authors will be irrevocably eroded, perhaps destroyed entirely.