Publishers and authors are taking Google to court over
its programme to digitise the libraries of four US universities,
Oxford university library and the New York Public Library.
Google has said that it will subpoena two of its fiercest
competitors, Yahoo! and Microsoft, for information relating to
their own book scanning operations as part of the case. The
information being sought by Google includes project costs, lists of
books, estimates of sales and details of discussions with
publishers.
The competitors may be reluctant to hand over sensitive
commercial information to Google, but the court has ordered
restrictions on who can see the data. "We have also made clear to
these organizations that we will work with them to address any
concerns about their confidential information," Google spokeswoman
Megan Lamb told newswire Bloomberg.
Google said that it would also issue similar subpoenas for
documents from Amazon.com and publisher Random House.
Google's project involves the digitising of books at the
libraries so that they can be searchable in a project called Google
Book Search. The publishing industry is instead backing a separate
project called the Open Content Alliance (OCA).
The OCA's specific aims are to make sure that content is freely
available and that works in the public domain remain in the public
domain after digitisation. That programme is backed by a mixture of
companies and non-profit organisations.
The OCA is backed by Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, the Smithsonian
Institute Libraries and the UK's National Archives. Yahoo! and
Microsoft are also part of the OCA, and it is documents in relation
to this which Google is asking to see.
The OCA seeks specific copyright permission before copying any
work. Google's project allows a rights owner to stop a work being
copied but automatically copies works unless it has been instructed
not to.
The Association of American Publishers is co-ordinating the
legal action and says that copyright law mandates that someone ask
before copying any work, rather than operate on an opt-out
basis.
