Google’s legal team has been busy and they are starting to fight back with subpoenas. Google’s alone on this book search database though. Yahoo! and Microsoft are teamed up as part of the Open Content Alliance which first obtains permissions from authors and publishers before making specific sections of copyrighted material available to the public.
Google intends to find out through its subpoenas exactly what criteria the rival scanning projects intend to use judge what constitutes fair use, as well as financial details of how book sales would be affected and digital rights management features.
Google isn’t likely going to back down any time soon on this matter. Google is aiming to be a global source for information and this is one of the major steps in doing that.
