Is Google being accused again?

May 31, 2005

Could Google breach even more copyright rules with its Harvard and Oxford university initiative?

In 2004, Google announced agreements with five of the world's biggest universities, including Oxford and Harvard, to scan the better part of the contents of their whole libraries to the Internet.

Google's plan is to make millions of important but previously inaccessible documents available to researchers everywhere with just a few clicks.

The head of Oxford University's library service said the project could turn out to be almost as important as the invention of the printing press. Google meanwhile claimed its motives were purely altruistic, the realisation of a longstanding dream for the group's billionaire founders Sergey Page and Larry Brin who'd worked on a digital library project during their student days.

But from the start Google's plan met opposition. The latest sign of this is a letter to Google from the American Association of University Presses which represents non profit making academic publishers. The organisation wants clarification on sixteen issues, claiming the book scanning scheme appears to involve systematic infringment of copyright on a massive scale.

Other opposition has come from France, where there are fears that the Google project will enhance of the dominance of the English language and Anglo-Saxon ways of thinking. France and several other European countries recently got EU backing for a rival book scanning project for works not in English.

Supporters of the Google scheme say copyright is protected because many of the works being initially scanned in are old texts not by living authors, and where copyright is an issue only a list of the contents and a few sentences from the text will be available on the internet.

Source: The BBC

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