Jonathan Band has written an interesting analysis of Google’s Print Library Project, which would see Google scanning the full text of printed works contained in the libraries of several large universities. The results would be imported into its search database using optical character recognition and brief excerpts served up with keyword and affiliate advertising.
The programme was recently halted until November amidst copyright concerns following its announcement:
The Print Library Project involves two actions that raise copyright questions. First, Google copies the full text of books into its search database. Second, in response to user queries, Google presents users with a few sentences from the stored text. Because the amount of expression presented to the user is de minimus, this second action probably would not lead to liability. But even if a court did not view the second action as de minimus, both actions fall within the scope of the fair use privilege. …
Fair use under the US Copyright Act is generally broader and more flexible than the copyright exceptions in other countries, including fair dealing in the UK. Thus, the scanning of a library of books might not be permitted under the copyright laws of most other countries. However, copyright law is territorial; that is, one infringes the copyright laws of a particular country only with respect to acts of infringement that occurred in that country. Since Google presumably will be scanning the books in the United States, the only relevant law with respect to the scanning is US copyright law.
Nonetheless, the search results will be viewable in other countries. This means that Google’s distribution of a few sentences from a book to a user in another country must be analysed under that country’s copyright laws. (Google arguably is causing a copy of the sentences to be made in the random access memory of the user’s computer.) While the copyright laws of most countries might not be so generous as to allow the reproduction of an entire book, almost all copyright laws do permit short quotations. These exceptions for quotations should be sufficient to protect Google’s transmission of Library Project search results to users.
Fair use appears to provide a possible answer under US law. It will be interesting to see whether Australia enacts a comparable exception of our own. The scanning technology is certainly very cool.
