Google library rights row

Moves by American online search company Google to create a virtual library of 15 million rare and historic books have become mired in copyright law.

While Google staff are due to arrive at Oxford University's Bodleian Library later this month to begin making digital copies of up to 1.5 million 19th-century books, the project has generated a flurry of legal debate.

Although Google has said it will respect the copyright relating to the works, both the American Association of University Publishers and the UK Publishers Association have written to Google seeking clarification on a number of rights issues.

The Google Print project, announced late last year, aims to provide online access to information stretching back over hundreds of years, much of it confined to hard copies stored on library shelves.

The company has struck deals with five of the English-speaking world's greatest libraries - those at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Michigan universities, and The New York Public Library.

While the Google Print project has been lauded by scholars, publishers have been less welcoming of the move.

Some publishers that have signed up to supply Google with digital copies of current publications now claim they were not fully informed of the scheme to digitise entire library collections.

Graham Taylor, the director of the Publishers Association, told The Bookseller magazine this week: "The issue is on what basis Google thinks it has the right to digitise material still in copyright, how it knows what is in copyright and what criteria it applies."

In a letter to Google, the AAUP says it considers the scanning of library books "to be a fundamental, broad-sweeping violation of the Copyright Act, and this large-scale infringement has the potential for serious financial damage".

"What protection do copyright owners have against Google itself deciding to adopt a new business model that involves the direct exploitation of these copies by, for example, offering Google users access through the pay-per-view system for which Google has a patent application pending?"

Ronald Milne, acting head of the Bodleian, said that the library specifically chose 19th-century books, which include works by Charles Darwin and Edgar Allan Poe, to avoid issues of copyright. He said that the Google project fitted well with the mission of the library and was hard to refuse.

But Harvard plans to provide randomly selected shelves of library books to Google for scanning. There are concerns that Google will be unable to determine which books are still in copyright.

Google has been mostly silent on the issues surrounding the project, commenting only to confirm that it will respect copyright.

In a letter to The Times Higher , Martin Delaney, the UK's Copyright and Licensing Authority's legal director, says: "It seems highly unlikely that systematically scanning entire works could be considered fair use under either UK or US law. Certainly the accessing of scanned extracts by the public at large would represent an infringement if permission from the copyright owners has not been obtained in advance.

"Some of the problems may be overcome if scanning is limited to out-of-copyright works, although great care would need to be taken to identify whether or not a given work was out of copyright. Generally, copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years.

"However, in the UK, new editions of otherwise out-of-copyright works enjoy a further period of protection of 25 years," Mr Delaney says.

"If an electronic archive were located in the US, the initial acts of scanning and retention of the copies in the US would fall to be judged under US law, but anyone accessing the archive in the UK would be receiving and making electronic copies in the UK and therefore would be subject to UK law. It is also possible that the overseas provider of a service accessed in the UK could also be subject to UK law."