(oh no, the old world’s final wrath is just coming crashing down on grand old google books!)
(a paris court found google guilty of copyright infringement, ordering it to pay €300,000 to a french publisher, and €10,000 a day until it removes extracts of the publisher’s books from its database)
(i bet they still wear goofy wigs + costumes in those parisian courts)
(google plans to appeal)
(the issue is at hand is pretty pivotal for the digital future. publishers have long maintained that google books has no right to store full texts of copyrighted (copywritten?) materials into their own databases and then publish snippets of the books on the web)
(google maintains that this is the digital equivalent of a ‘card catalog’)
(google only provides full texts of works in the ‘public domain’)
(“google books” (previously known as Google Book Search and Google Print) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database)
Books are provided either by publishers and authors, through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google’s library partners, through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.
The Publisher Program was first known as ‘Google Print’ when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. The Google Books Library Project, which scans works in the collections of library partners and adds them to the digital inventory, was announced in December 2004.
The Google Books initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online body of human knowledge and promoting the democratization of knowledge.
But it has also been criticized for potential copyright violations, and lack of editing to correct the many errors introduced into the scanned texts by the OCR process.
(as of October 2015, the number of scanned book titles was over 25 million, but the scanning process has slowed down in American academic libraries)
(google estimated in 2010 that there were about 130 million distinct titles in the world, and stated that it intended to scan all of them)