McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. v. Google Inc.

[McGraw-Hill owns S&P and decides what stocks go into the S&P 500. They put Lennar in instead of Google last revision.]



Friday, October 21, 2005
ISSN 1535-1610
News

Copyrights
Opt Out Plan for Google Library Project
Conflicts With Copyright Act, Say Publishers


A copyright owner is under no duty to self-identify which among its works it does not want infringed, according to a complaint filed against Google Inc. Oct. 19 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. v. Google Inc., S.D. N.Y., No. 05 CV 8881, filed 10/19/05).

At issue in the lawsuit is the "Google Print for Libraries Project," an ambitious program to scan the entire collections of several prominent university libraries as well as the New York Public Library. Once completed, users will have unprecedented access to the texts of hundreds of thousands of books through the Google search engine. Google will allow users full-text searching of the works, but will only display excerpts of a few sentences each for works still subject to copyright protection.

Some publishers balked at the proposal, and in response Google suspended work on the project to give publishers a few months to identify specific titles in the libraries' collections that should not be scanned. The deadline to submit those lists is Nov. 1.

The Copyright Act "squarely put[s] the burden on Google" to obtain permission to copy the books, and not on the publisher to tell Google which particular titles ought not to be copied, said McGraw-Hill Companies Inc., joined by other publishing houses.

"Both the Google Library Project and Google's pronouncement that publishers must provide to Google detailed lists of books that they wish to be excluded are contrary to the black letter requirements of the Copyright Act," the complaint charged. The publishers argued that they have already advised Google that none of their works should be copied, and that it is incumbent on Google to search the libraries' bibliographic records to identify the pertinent titles to be excluded.

As the publishers see it, Google is attempting to harness their copyrighted works as a draw for more users to visit the search engine. Presumably, the ultimate goal is to generate more ad revenue from sponsored links keyed to search terms. The publishers fear that Google's program is "likely to usurp [their] present and future business opportunities" for exploiting the works digitally.

The Authors Guild raised similar concerns in a separate complaint it filed against Google in September (183 PTD, 09/22/05 ).

Bruce Keller of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, New York, filed the complaint for the publishers.

Full text of complaint available at http://pub.bna.com/eclr/058881.pdf.


By Michael Warnecke


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