Google presented each of these kinds of books—public domain, publisher permission, and publisher permission not explicitly granted—in three different ways. But the most important one, the one around which the lawsuit formed, was where the book is in copyright and the publisher has not explicitly given permission for it to be scanned and displayed by Google. What Google displays in this instance is a snippet, a very small amount of the text, often just a fragment of a sentence. That takes us to this year. In August, the complaints had started to come in from publishers and authors, and in September the first lawsuit came in. The Authors Guild filed suit claiming massive copyright violation. In October the publishers also filed a complaint. Google paused their scanning process for a while to discuss this. This month they restarted the scanning process, continuing mainly with the older books and those in the public domain. Subsequently, other companies have come in. Yahoo and Microsoft, along with Internet Archives and Larry Lessig’s Creative Commons, have started something called The Open Content Alliance, which is scanning and making available public domain books and those where the publishers have opted in. Today, to complicate things entirely, the Google Print Library Project has been renamed Google Book Search, not to be confused with Microsoft Book Search. So that’s where we stand. There are three classes of books, Google is presenting the three in three different ways, and one of those ways has caused enough offense to trigger two lawsuits.

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