Copyright Issues - ASMP vs Google Books

This article describes a current legal suit that is being filed against Google by visual artists. The America Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) is seeking a class-action lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement with their Google Books endeavor. Google books is a database of books that have been scanned and put through an optical character recognition (OCR) to digitize the book and have it available online. The article goes on to state that in 2005 a lawsuit was filed by book authors about copyright infringement by Google when they were providing previews of book texts without consent or compensation to the authors. The ASMP was not able to join in on the same lawsuit that the book authors had established. The article claims that the book authors versus Google lawsuit “is expected to be settled soon.” (Sutter 2010) The lawsuit filed by the ASMP is very similar to the claims made by the 2005 lawsuit. The artists claim that they want financial compensation for the artwork that appears in the books that are present in Google Books. Google is sticking to its guns and claiming that they are completely compliant with all copyright laws when Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman, released this statement: “We are confident that Google Books is fully compliant with U.S. and international copyright law," (Sutter 2010)

I found this article particularly interesting because of how recent and relevant it is to our current times. Obviously there must be some major grey areas in copyright laws for both of these parties to believe that they are correct and justified in their business or legal actions. This matter will ultimately be settled either in court by a judge or outside of court with a settlement. I believe that the graphic artists and illustrators have as much legal right to their illustrations as the book authors do to the text written in the book. Therefore, the outcome of the book author lawsuit versus Google will be vital to the success for the ASMP’s lawsuit. Whatever the outcome of both of these lawsuits, if this goes before a judge (and most likely later appealed to higher courts), this could be changing the laws and rules regarding copyrights as we speak. It is common that previous court rulings (especially Supreme Court rulings) be used as arguments and examples in future similar cases. This modern legal battle could result in a change in the way that copyright rules are enforced the conversion of traditional copyright material and it’s conversion to digital, online information. It will be interesting to follow the outcome of these cases and how it will affect the future of copyright laws.

Sutter, John (April 7, 2010). “Visual Artists Sue Google over Copyright Issues.” Retrieved June 18, 2010 from the World Wide Web: http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2010/04/07/visual-artists-sue-google-over-copyright-issues/