MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
October 1-15, 2005 Edition
AAP Lends Support
To Writers Guild
Suit Against Google
NEW YORK, NY/9/22/05The Association of American Publishers continues efforts to stop Internet search company, Google, from the wholesale digitizing books, with little regard for copyright laws. In a statement September 21, the AAP board of directors issued a formal statement in response to an announcement by the Authors guild that it has filed a class action suit against Google. The suit charges that Googles plan to digitize without prior permission of the rights holder as part of its Print Library Project represents massive copyright infringement.
“We fully support the Author’s Guild’s motives and share the important concerns raised in the suit, the statement said. We hope that Google will resume the dialogue we began several months ago in an effort to seek an acceptable approach to the treatment of copyrighted works.
The Authors Guild and three writers filed suit in U.S. district Court in Manhattan over Googles partnership with five major research libraries to scan books and place portions of them online.
The suit charges that the scanning project infringes the authors copyrights and will result in a loss of revenue for them and asks the court to ban the project. Google has said that it plans to scan all books at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, regardless of copyright, and it has plans to do the same with other library collections.
