Google to face second lawsuit over Google Print project

M2 Best Books, Oct 20, 2005

M2 BEST BOOKS-(C)2000-2005 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

The filing of a lawsuit was announced on Wednesday (19 October) by the Association of American Publishers against Internet company Google, over its plans to scan copyrighted books for its Google Print project.

As part of the project, which involves five libraries, Google is digitalising books to make them searchable at http://print.google.com. Publishers and authors are, however, extremely critical of the idea due to copyright issues.

A three-month pause in the scanning of copyrighted books for the Google Print Library project was previously announced by Google in August this year.

According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the lawsuit was filed after lengthy discussions broke down between AAP and management at Google regarding the copyright infringement issues surrounding the project.

The suit, which is being coordinated and funded by AAP, also has the backing of five publishing houses including McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education and Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons.

This latest lawsuit against Google is in addition to a prior suit filed on 20 September by the Authors Guild and US authors Herbert Mitgang, Betty Miles and Daniel Hoffman.

According to The Guardian, the Authors Guild filing is a class-action lawsuit that seeks damages, whilst the publishers' suit seeks only a declaration that Google is committing copyright infringement by scanning books.