[A2k] Spanish University first non-English library to join Google Book Search Project

[Judit Rius Sanjuan]

>From BNA's Internet Law News compiled by professor Michael Geist

The Complutense University of Madrid is becoming the first library in a non=
-English-speaking country to join Google Inc.'s bid to scan every book in p=
rint, as the controversial project extends its global reach. The university=
's library, the country's second largest behind the National Library, house=
s 3 million works, including thousands of Spanish-language public domain bo=
oks, including those of Cervantes and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.
<http://tinyurl.com/qmhpl> [AFP]

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/26092006/80-91/spanish-university-joins-google-boo=
k-scan-plan.html

LONDON (Reuters) - The Complutense University of Madrid is becoming the
first library in a non-English-speaking country to join Google Inc.'s
bid to scan every book in print, as the controversial project extends
its global reach.

The university's library, the country's second largest behind the
National Library, houses 3 million works, including thousands of
Spanish-language public domain books, including those of Cervantes and
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. It also contains thousands of volumes in
French, German, Latin, Italian and English.

"We already have other non-English-language books, but this will be a
huge boost to our Spanish-language content, as well as other languages,"
a Google spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

More than 400 million people speak Spanish around the world.

Madrid joins Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the universities of Michigan and
California and the New York Public Library for the project being run by
the world's most popular search company. The U.S. Library of Congress is
involved in a similar effort with Google.

The Internet giant is funding the scanning of titles as part of a nearly
two-year-old effort to make the library collections searchable online.

Authors and publishers' groups in the United States, France and Germany
have sued Google over the programme as it relates to books still under
copyright, claiming that by digitising them it might tempt consumers to
stop buying printed works.

Google argues that it is simply creating an electronic index and that it
only will publish full texts of books whose copyrights have expired. It
recently began allowing users to download and print public domain books
for free, including works by Charles Dickens and James Joyce.

For works still protected, Google publishes only a few sentences based
on a user's search query.

Publishers maintain that scanning the books in the first place is a
violation of copyright law. Many of them have launched their own digital
scanning projects in a bid to lure consumers to their own Web sites.

Following the legal threats, some of Google's library partners said they
would only allow scanning of public domain works, and delay anything
still protected by copyright until the issue was resolved by the courts.

Only the University of Michigan said it would proceed with scanning all
works.

--
Judit Rius Sanjuan
judit.rius at cptech.org
www.cptech.org

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