14 DAY TRIAL // The problem of copyright and intellectual property is of utmost importance nowadays. Despite this, it seems that exactly the authorities and companies which should regard these rights as a principle to uphold at any costs are the ones infringing them.
As we told you in a previous article, Google has announced its latest project, called Google Library, which is derived from Google Print and has the purpose of digitizing entire University libraries and more.
Google has tried to raise the publishing houses' interest by promising them important revenues, resulting from the initiative of placing some contextual ads on the same page the text is on, but the publishers have placed different restrictions exactly on the texts to be published by Google. However, some of them agreed to let Google publish some pages, and other only some key words.
The biggest problem is that some of the most important American universities, as well as New York's Central Library have agreed to grant Google full access to their entire collections. Practically, as Allan Adler, vice president for legal affairs for the Association of American Publishers (AAP), says, "Having reached these agreements with publishers for the use of books under their copyright, Google now announced they'd scan works from several libraries, including works that are currently under copyright. without requesting the permission of the copyright owners. Imagine the consternation that caused among publishing houses who realized the possibility that books they had agreed to provide to Google under contract might nevertheless be scanned by Google without those agreements."
Thus, we can see that this initiative is completely opposed to the concept of copyright, and unfortunately it's very likely that it will become somewhat of a general habit, taking into consideration the fierce race between the major search engines, which are struggling to offer increasingly diversified and complete search results to their users. We're quite curious to see the reaction of the damaged parties, because it is very likely that this whole situation will only be resolved in court.