Authors are leaving money on the table by suing Google...

all “had different views on whether this Court should have approved” the proposed settlement among authors, publishers and Google, which the court last year shot down on competition and other grounds (WID March 23 p1), the Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Library Association (ALA), Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and Association of Research Libraries now support the company’s motion for summary judgment, they said. A world without Google Book Search is a much more difficult world in which to do research, and thus librarians don’t know what books they should be purchasing for their collections, the brief said (http://bit.ly/QjBaa1). A “researcher at a small, chronically underfunded university researching indigenous astronomy” in 2004 would have little help from his librarian in finding potential relevant sources because they “may be out of print, and/or buried in other libraries [sic] collections that may or may not be well-indexed,” the brief said. Google’s book project in 2005 finally helped librarians “identify and efficiently sift through possible research sources,” gives “amateur historians ... access to a wealth of previously obscure material” and lets “everyday readers and researchers ... find books that were once buried in research library archives,” the groups said: “There is a great deal more at stake in this case than any company or author’s bottom line.” A win for the Authors Guild won’t give any author “a penny of additional revenue,” they said. The brief points to precedents from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which the New York court isn’t bound to follow, that found thumbnail images created by a search engine don’t infringe the full-image owner’s copyright, and Google Book Search serves a similar purpose: Its display of snippets “added a further purpose” or had a “different character” than the underlying books from which those snippets came, the groups said. The groups attached declarations drawn from informal surveys by the ALA and ACRL that found Google Book Search “has become an indispensable research tool, particularly for students and faculty at small and remote educational institutions.” They included a statement from Melissa Pond, director of library services at Leech Lake Tribal College in Minnesota, that the Google service “led us to several titles that my faculty have gladly and gratefully ordered for their private research collections and helped me to identify the best uses of our very, very limited collection development resources."