PressEthic

A children’s author, a poet and a former NY Times cultural correspondent have filed a class-action lawsuit against Google, claiming its online library will violate copyright law.

Google is shaking its head in disbelief. According to the UK Guardian, which spoke with Susan Wojcicki, Google’s product management vice-president, the library won’t display “a single page” of copyrighted material unless the author okay’s it. At most, she said, the library “will show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries.”

Google hasn’t exactly defined “a brief snippet”, and “fair use” is yet to be fleshed out.

According to US copyright law, the term applies to “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.” For all other cases—like whether the work is being reprinted for commercial or non-profit use—“fair use” is open to interpretation. And thus, litigation.

Ironically, Daniel Hoffman and Betty Miles, two of the three authors filing the suit, have reprinted material on Amazon.com’s “search inside” function, which supposedly allows readers to only browse a couple of pages at a time (though anyone who’s even a little tech-savvy—and patient—can exploit this function and print out an entire book). While the difference between Amazon and Google is one of permission—the former only uses the search function if the publisher allows it, while the latter is indexing whole catalogs from a number of university libraries—Amazon’s system seems more potentially damaging to authors.

If Hoffman and Miles want to make a stink about readers heisting “brief snippets” from their works, they should at least be consistent. Go after the publishers. Go after Amazon. Or, download the letter from authorslawyer.com that says “I demand that you immediately remove access to [short work] through the "search inside the book" feature because appearance in that feature infringes my copyright.”