Whose intellectual property is it anyway?

Amazon has already done authors a service by allowing access to vastly more titles than the average bookshop. Now Google and Yahoo, the internet companies, are trying to take this a stage further by scanning books so that they can be searched like any other document on the internet.

There are plenty of potential benefits for authors in having the contents of books made retrievable in this way. Allowing snippets of books to be accessed easily keeps them in the public mind. It may also stimulate sales if somebody who finds an extract then decides to buy the book.

So the scheme proposed by Yahoo and other groups including the University of California this week is valuable. The Open Content Alliance, backed by Yahoo, will digitise books that are in the public domain, either because the copyright term has expired or the authors have chosen to make them available…

This contrasts with the approach taken by Google with its Google Print programme. Google has reached an agreement with the universities of Harvard, Michigan and Stanford to scan millions of books into a searchable database. Unlike Yahoo, Google is taking an “opt-out” approach: unless an author or publisher asks for a book not to be scanned, it will be.

Now Google is being sued by a group of authors and the Authors Guild for breaching US copyright law. It claims to be acting legally because it will only display snippets of books unless it has express permission to reproduce them in full…

But Google’s approach smacks of the high-handed attitude often taken by technology companies towards copyright owners. They claim to be acting in the public interest as much as their own (Google will finance its scheme by selling advertisements alongside search results)…

No matter what benefits this scheme could bring, authors must be asked before their work is reproduced. Google ought not to use the slippery device of assumed permission to harvest intellectual property for its own purposes. Yahoo has shown there is another way and Google should take heed.

Excerpted from an editorial in the ‘Financial Times’, October 5