Harvard Writes Off Google

Google's big book-scanning project just keeps running into more problems. Last week, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers settled their long-standing lawsuit against the search company, in which they argued that scanning long sections of copyrighted books in university libraries violated the rights of authors and publishers. Google paid both groups $125 million to spread among its members and go away, which left the company free to continue its project of digitally collecting books and other research material in one global archive. Now, the Harvard University Library, which was one of Google's original partners in the project, has walked away from the effort and denied Google access to its enormous collection. According to the Harvard Crimson, University Library Director Robert Darnton claims that under the settlement, Google is free to jack up fees unreasonably to access the material, violating the spirit of academic inquiry and gouging researchers. In addition, scanning diminishes the quality of the work by excluding photographs and graphs in the original material.

Meanwhile, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society fellow Wendy Seltzer suspects that Google agreed to the settlement in order to guarantee themselves a monopoly on cataloguing the world's most important research material. Google's fair use argument had a lot of legs, Seltzer told PC World, and the company could have clarified the concept of fair use in American copyright law, freeing the world's libraries for the use of everyone. Instead, Google used its enormous cash reserves to establish a precedent whereby any entity seeking to archive similar material must pay millions of dollars, effectively locking out anyone who doesn't have the search engine's capital. In other words, what looks like a victory for writers may in fact just be a clever way for Google to dominate another market.