Google's Book Battle.

On Nov. 1, if all goes according to plan, workers at the University of Michigan, Harvard and Stanford will begin piling all of their books, old and new, onto carts and delivering them into the maw of scanners furnished and financed by Silicon Valley's wunderkind, Google. Employees of the search giant will scan the books and make digital copies, which will then be made accessible and searchable to the 80 million Internet users who visit Google.com every month. To James Hilton, an associate provost at Michigan, the ability to browse books online is nothing short of world changing. "I have a hard time even imagining how important it's going to be to search the printed word as we now search the Web," he says.

But not everyone likes this plot twist as much as Hilton does. Last week five major publishers, working through their trade group, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), sued in a New York federal court to stop Google. The booksmiths charge that by making electronic copies, the search giant is committing massive copyright infringement. The suit could amount to little more than a footnote in the dramatic tale of Google's growth (last week it announced a 700 percent leap in quarterly earnings over last year). But it could also portend ominous times ahead. Google's aggressive plans for expansion include making copies of videos, photos and news articles to add to its robust search index. The book publishers, among others, believe these plans trample their rights. "The law does not say you can take my stuff because you're going to do something with it that is going to be really good for humanity," says Pat Schroeder, the former Colorado congresswoman and head of the AAP.

Google disagrees and brings a missionary zeal to its library project, partly because it falls directly within the company's mission: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." For years Google has eyed the world's estimated store of 30 million books. In late 2003, it took its first step into the book world with the program Google Print. As Amazon does with its pioneering "search inside the book" feature, Google adds in-print, copyrighted works to its databases--but only with the permission of book publishers.

But Google wanted to do more. Only a few percent of all books remain in print and Google salivates over the prospect of adding the rest, driving more traffic to its site and earning more ad dollars. It struck book-scanning partnerships with five major institutions, including New York Public Library and Oxford. This time Google wasn't asking for copyright-holder permission, and didn't think it had to. It serves up only a few sentences of protected works to Web searchers, which it considers legal under the "fair use" provision of the 1976 Copyright Act. It also points users to sites where they can buy the entire book.

Book publishers were wary of the project from the beginning. In early July, Schroeder's organization invited Google CEO Eric Schmidt to a board meeting, and Schmidt agreed to stop the scanning of copyrighted works until Nov. 1. But negotiations went nowhere. In conference calls, publishers suggested storing digital copies of copyrighted books on their servers instead of Google's, and made a more formal proposal to retrofit the global database of ISBN numbers--one has been assigned to each book since 1970--so that Google could efficiently check which books are copyright protected and leave those out of its database. Since Google felt its scanning was perfectly legal, it dismissed those ideas, though it agreed to allow publishers themselves to withdraw specific books from the search index. Google senior counsel Alex Macgillivray says that often publishers don't even know who owns the rights to their older books. "The idea behind making an index that is comprehensive is defeated if you have to go door to door to ask permission only from the people whose rights you can identify," he says.

The outcome of the case will hinge on the legal interpretation of fair use, which factors in whether copying is for commercial or noncommercial use, and whether it harms the potential market of the copyrighted work. Many lawyers think the company will have a tough time in the courts, and some believe it could be fined tens of thousands of dollars for each copyrighted work it scans. For Google, checking books out of the library could prove frighteningly expensive.

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By Brad Stone