Criticism on Google Copyright Issues

Google Print, Books, and Library

Google's ambitious plans to scan millions of books and make them readable through its search engine have been criticized for copyright infringment. The Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers and the Association of American University Presses both issued statements strongly opposing Google Print, stating that "Google, an enormously successful company, claims a sweeping right to appropriate the property of others for its own commercial use unless it is told, case by case and instance by instance, not to."

Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers lawsuit

On September 20, 2005, the Authors Guild, a group that represents 8,000 U.S. authors, filed a class action suit in federal court in Manhattan against Google over its unauthorized scanning and copying of books through its Google Library program. Google responded that its use was a fair use because they were only showing "snippets" for books where they did not have permission from a rightsholder and was in compliance with all existing and historical applications of copyright laws regarding books. Google temporarily suspended scanning copyrighted works to allow for changes to its program and allow copyright owners to submit lists of books they wished to be excluded. In the Spring of 2006 the parties began negotiations in hopes of settling the lawsuit.

On October 28, 2008, Google announced a proposed agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers in which Google would pay $125 million to settle the lawsuit. The agreement also included licensing provisions, allowing Google to sell personal and institutional subscriptions to its database of books. On November 9, 2009, the parties filed an amended settlement agreement after the U.S. Department of Justice filed a brief suggesting that the initial agreement may violate US anti-trust laws. Following a Fairness Hearing in February, on March 22, 2011 supervising judge Denny Chin issued a ruling rejecting the settlement. Chin urged that the settlement be revised from "opt-out" to "opt-in" and set a date for a "status conference" at which to discuss next steps.

On November 14, 2013, Judge Chin issued a ruling dismissing the lawsuit, saying that Google's use of the works was a "fair use" under copyright law. The executive director of the Authors Guild, said in an interview that the result was "obviously disappointing" and that the authors would appeal. Google said it was "delighted" with the outcome.

Chinese writers

In a separate dispute in November 2009, the China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS), which protects Chinese writers' copyrights, accused Google of scanning 18,000 books by 570 Chinese writers without authorization, for its Google Books library. Toward the end of 2009 representatives of the CWWCS said talks with Google about copyright issues are progressing well, that first they "want Google to admit their mistake and apologize", then talk about compensation, while at the same time they "don't want Google to give up China in its digital library project". On 20 November 2009, Google agreed to provide a list of Chinese books it had scanned, but did not admit having "infringed" copyright laws. In a 9 January 2010 statement the head of Google Books in the Asia-Pacific said "communications with Chinese writers have not been good enough" and apologized to the writers.

Mian Mian lawsuit

In December 2009, Chinese writer Mian Mian filed a lawsuit against the company, for scanning her entire novel without notifying her or paying her for copyright permission. Google removed Mian's work from its online library shortly after learning of the suit. In January 2013, a Chinese court ordered Google to pay Mian compensation of 5,000 yuan (US$800) for scanning her works without permission.

Links and cached data

Kazaa and the Church of Scientology have used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to demand that Google remove references to allegedly copyrighted material on their sites.

Search engines such as Google's that link to sites in "good faith" fall under the safe harbor provisions of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act which is part of DMCA. If they remove links to infringing content after receiving a take down notice, they are not liable. Google removes links to infringing content when requested, providing supporting evidence is supplied. However, it is sometimes difficult to judge whether or not certain sites are infringing and Google (and other search engines) will sometimes refuse to remove web pages from its index. To complicate matters there have been conflicting rulings from U.S. courts on whether simply linking to infringing content constitutes "contributory infringement" or not.

The New York Times has complained that the caching of their content during a web crawl, a feature utilized by search engines including Google Web Search, violates copyright. Google observes Internet standard mechanisms for requesting that caching be disabled via the robots.txt file, which is another mechanism that allows operators of a website to request that part or all of their site not be included in search engine results, or via META tags, which allow a content editor to specify whether a document can be crawled or archived, or whether the links on the document can be followed. The U.S. District Court of Nevada ruled that Google's caches do not constitute copyright infringement under American law in Field v. Google and Parker v. Google.

Google Map Maker

Google Map Maker allows user contributed data to be put into the Google Maps service, similar to OpenStreetMap it includes concepts such as organising mapping parties and mapping for humanitarian efforts. It has been criticised for taking work done for free by the general public and claiming commercial ownership of it without returning any contributions back to the commons as their restrictive license makes it incompatible with most open projects by preventing commercial use or use by competitive services.