Reuters: “Google Should Pay $750 a Book, Say Authors in Copyright Case”

Update (August 6, 2012): Google aimed to burn Amazon with Library Project, says Authors Guild
VentureBeat reports on something mentioned found in the filing (embedded below):

Like the best, most selfless kind of librarian, the Google Books Library Project aims to make it easier for people to find books.
But according to a new court filing by the Authors Guild, Google’s efforts weren’t aimed at improving libraries at all: The company wanted to hurt Amazon.
“We want web searchers interested in book content to come to Google, not Amazon,” the filing quotes Google as saying in a 2003 presentation.

Read the Complete Article
Actually, the full text from the presentation (page 12 of court filing) is:
“We want web searchers interested in book content to come to Google, not Amazon,” [e]verything is secondary…but make money.”
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From Reuters:

Authors suing Google over the digitization of their books have asked a New York court to order the Internet company to pay $750 for each book it copied, distributed or displayed.
The authors’ filing was lodged in federal court in the Southern District of New York last month, but was only made public on Friday. In the filing, the Authors Guild, whose president is novelist-lawyer Scott Thurow [sic], urged the court to rule that Google’s digitization project does not constitute “fair use” under copyright law.

Google has scanned more than 20 million books since scanning began in 2004.
Read the Complete Article
Authors Guild v. Google–Redacted Version: Plaintiff Motion for Summary Judgement (Memorandum of Law in Sup…
See Also: Google Books hasn’t cost authors a dime, company says (via ars technica; July 27, 2012)

Filed under: Digital Preservation, Libraries, News, Reports