German Court Tells Publisher To Leave Google's Book Scanning Project Alone

from the you'll-lose dept

There hasn’t been much attention paid to the Google Print and Google Library projects lately, as most are simply waiting for the various lawsuits to play themselves out. Most of the cases were filed in the US, but apparently one publisher filed against Google in Germany, to which a German court has told the publisher not to bother, because they won’t win. The court makes it clear that there’s no copyright infringement going on, as Google is only indexing the books and showing small snippets — no different than the way a regular search engine works. It’s nice to see at least one reasonable court decision on this matter, but there are still plenty of chances for other courts to screw this up.


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Comments on “German Court Tells Publisher To Leave Google's Book Scanning Project Alone”

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7 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

while here in the US on the other hand

while here in the US on the other hand, the major publishers will simply do as the RIAA and MPAA do when Google or some blog site gives free advertising to something, the publisher’s will pay off the courts, or at the very least, do all they can to make them seem to be the devil incarnate…

rijit (profile) says:

It's all about Money and Control.

The whole issue boils down to control, publishers think they are loosing control because Google never asked them. If Google had of offered some small nominal money per entry they would have jumped all over it but since Google is doing it and will make money from it, the publishers think they should get some money. I tend to kind of agree, to an extent, though small nominal fee, not some big royalty. The only reason I say that is Google will make money off the project, they are not doing it to be humanitarian, greed drives this project like every other at Google or any Corp, their bottom line are the profits. So, using advertising on the project, Google will make money from said project. If they were completely free I still think there would be lawsuits since I believe it is more about control and no one wants to loose it.

Thomas says:

Re: It's all about Money and Control.

The publishers are making money off of it also, since google’s only showing a snippet of the book, the person doing the search will still need to go out and buy the book to get the full text of it, Unless publishers are somehow worried this will cause a sudden rise in people getting library cards.

Sean (user link) says:

lol..

It’s kind of funny to see these stupid people. Because basically they are saying they don’t want free advertising for their book. It’s something online, where millions of people visit each day. What’s not to be beneficial there?

Though people like to keep ‘control’ over their products, this seems a bit of a step too far. Just get over the fact that printing shit on this so called ‘paper’ isn’t working anymore. SAVE THE TREES 😀

That’s my two cents.

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