By: Elisabeth Hanratty
Last December Google announced the formation of partnerships with select major libraries to begin digitizing and storing the libraries’ collections online. Google aims to provide individuals with the ability to search the full text of these books from anywhere using the Google search engine. This project will greatly increase access to those works in the public domain, but what about the books still under copyright protection? This iBrief examines the copyright implications of this ambitious project and concludes that the project, as described, does infringe the rights of copyright holders. It further concludes that while such infringement is unlikely to be found to be a fair use, it may ultimately be in the copyright holders’ best interests to acquiesce to Google’s infringement.
Cite: 2005 Duke L. & Tech. Rev. 0010