Google attacked by US publisher
25 May 2005
A US publishing organisation has lashed out at search giant Google over plans to put university libraries online.
Google announced deals with four of the world's top universities last year as part of a $200 million (£110 million) plan to put 15 million volumes online by 2015. The libraries of Stanford, Michigan and Harvard universities, the New York Public Library, and Oxford University in England, have all signed up to the digital library project.
An umbrella organisation for American publishers of academic journals and scholarly books has written to Google claiming that the plan could have serious financial consequences for works publishers own the rights to. The Association of American University Presses suggested that the ambitious project will violate copyrights and affect future sales.
The association asked Google to respond to a list of 16 questions about how the company it plans proposes to protect copyrights.
Two unnamed publishers have already asked Google to withhold its copyrighted material from the project. Google has pointed out that it offers protections to copyright holders and users will only see a few lines of text and bibliographic information for books still in copyright.
"Although we believe there are many business advantages for publishers to participate in Google Print, they may opt out, and their books scanned in libraries will not be displayed to Google users," the company said in a statement.
California-based Google intends to make millions of texts available to researchers worldwide and the head of Oxford University's library service has suggested that it could be the most important development in academia since the invention of the printing press.
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