Google Counters Critics of Library Project.

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Author: Foster, Andrea L.

THE BATTLE between publishers and Google over the Internet-search company's project to digitize library books has heated up with an announcement in February by Google that it was starting a campaign to dispel misperceptions about the project.

In an e-mail message posted online and addressed to "Google Book Search supporters," two Google officials said they were creating a "fact-checking brigade" about the company's digitization effort. And they proceeded to rip apart a column in Newsday by the writer Susan Cheever, in which she accused Google of stealing authors' works.

"It's a strange experience to see your own property in someone else's possession when they haven't asked your permission for it or paid for it," wrote Ms. Cheever in the December 12,2005 column. "It's disorienting and infuriating. You've been robbed."

Google Book Search, which includes the Google Library Project, is an effort to digitize millions of books and index them on Google's search engine. Google says it will provide online access to the full text of books that are no longer copyright protected. For the vast majority of books, those that are copyright protected and out of print, Google will provide only a snippet of text online.

Groups representing publishers and authors have sued Google, arguing that digitizing copyrighted works for commercial use without permission from the copyright owners violates copyright law.

Google's partners in the library project are five research institutions: Harvard and Stanford Universities; the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; the University of Oxford, in England; and the New York Public Library.

Google says its project is permissible under copyright law's "fair use" exemption.

But Ms. Cheever disputes the point in her column, stating that fair use allows people to distribute only a set amount of words from a work. "The amount of words that constitute fair use varies according to court case," she writes. "At present, it is 400 words."

Taking aim at that statement, Alexander Macgillivray, a Google lawyer, and Jen Grant, a marketing manager for the company, say Ms. Cheever "fundamentally misstates copyright law and misleads readers about Google Book Search." The Google employees say that there is no word limit associated with fair use and that some courts have ruled that republishing an entire work is fair use. They made the statement in a February e-mail message.

The message also urges people "to help clear the air when misleading articles like this one are published."

A fact sheet on fair use written by the U.S. Copyright Office does not say that fair use is limited to a set number of words. It says fair use of a work is permitted for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair-use guidelines published by the office say that, for classroom purposes, an article of less than 2,500 words may be republished in its entirety. And the guidelines say that 1,000 words or 10 percent of a work of prose, whichever is less, can be republished.

But at least two publishers, Blackwell Publishing and Elsevier, advise authors and editors seeking to make fair use of a book to republish no more than 400 words.

Neither Ms. Cheever nor her agent responded to requests for comment.

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By Andrea L. Foster