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I’m finding this rather funny. Google is being sued by multiple groups over Google Print, Google’s plan to digitize paper books and make the content available online. Personally, I think it’s a great idea, as long as the information is freely available. I really don’t care if it is done by Google or some other company. That’s me, however the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers don’t like the plan… or at least they don’t like Google. Both organizations have filed a lawsuit against Google for copyright violations related to Google Print.

Now, while Google is in the courts there is a group of companies called the Open Content Alliance, which is comprised of the Smithsonian Institution, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN, Internet Archive, and others, which is wanting to do pretty much the exact same thing. You’ll be able to find the books scanned by the Microsoft-Yahoo-Internet Archive alliance at openlibrary.org.

Is this group looking for a lawsuit as well? With Google Print, you only get to view a snippet or a few pages at most; however what I saw at Open Library looks like you could sit at your computer and read through an entire book. How is Google violating copyright law if this other group isn’t? I just don’t understand.

Anyway, here is some more information on all of this:

• My Thoughts On Google Print
• Google Blog: Why we believe in Google Print
• Google Blog: The point of Google Print
• Google Blog: Buzz about Google Print and the lawsuit
• Google Blog: Google Print and the Authors Guild
• C|Net: An open-source rival to Google’s book project
• C|Net: Microsoft to offer book search
• BetaNews: MSN Joins Yahoo to Build Book Search
• Microsoft: MSN Search Announces MSN Book Search

Am I the only person that doesn’t understand the lawsuits?

You know, I never really understood what exactly Google was doing with the Google Print (Beta) project. I’ll admit I had never tried it out before today, and the only thing I really knew about it was that Google planned to scan a number of books and display them online.

My misunderstanding, which is probably shared with many other people, was that Google planned to show the entire book. i.e. A online library, where you didn’t have to “check out a book”.

Well after reading this post on the Google Blog, I realize I misunderstood the entire project. I’m betting a lot of other people are like me.

It’s not Google’s intent to display the entire book form cover to cover. Rather only excerpts from the books. For example, if you were to search for “Demon Soul” you would get a list of results of books that contained that phrase. Now, I was after the Warcraft related book, and the first result listed, War of the Ancients, Book Two: The Demon Soul. Clicking More results from this book you see that in the results returned we can see a number of pages where “Demon Soul” appears in the book. Page 3, 5, 7, 22, 27, and others. You don’t get to see every page of the book.

Another interesting thing that happened while using this was after clicking on about 5 pages or so, I received an error that stated I had reached my viewing limit for this book. Now for this book I was lucky, as it allowed me to see full pages, however the help page explains that in some situations, users may only see a partial excerpt from the book.

I admit, I didn’t fully understand this project until I looked into it more. I think the Authors Guild which is suing Google over this probably doesn’t understand it either. With the limitations Google has put into place, as well as the ability for authors to “opt out” of the program, I see absolutely nothing wrong with it.