Princeton joins Google Library Project
Princeton University is the latest partner to join Google's controversial Library Project.
Princeton, like partners including Harvard and Oxford, only wants books in the public domain digitized; one million of those are on tap. Other partners, including the University of Michigan and University of California, are allowing copyright-protected books to be digitized as well.
The digitization of books not yet in the public domain is at the heart of lawsuits filed against Google by publishers' and authors' groups in the United States and Europe.
Opponents of Google's Library Project claim that it is a copyright violation to scan and digitize the entirety of books that are copyright-protected, even though Google will only show small snippets of them when someone conducts a search. Google claims their method is covered under the "fair use" exemptions allowing small bits of copyright works to be copied. Searches for keywords inside books can be conducted here.
The Open Content Alliance, a competing book digitization project launched by Yahoo and the Internet Archive and later joined by Microsoft, is only working with public domain books.
