December 28, 2009
Chinese author plans lawsuit over Google Books
by Tom Krazit reporting for CNet News.

A Chinese author plans to sue Google for scanning one of her books into the Google Books database without her permission, according to a report.

Mian Mian intends to file suit this week against Google, claiming copyright infringement after discovering that her third book, "Acid Lovers," was scanned by Google as part of its book digitization project, according to AFP. The suit would be the first filed against Google in China over the Google Books project, which itself is no stranger to the courtroom.

Legal battles over Google's U.S. settlement with authors and publishers will stretch into 2010, nearly 15 months after Google first reached an agreement with those groups to allow it to continue scanning out-of-print but copyright-protected works. Google is the only organization with explicit permission to scan that type of book, which it has been doing since 2005 while claiming that fair-use laws permit such activity. (The rules governing its ability to display to that kind of book in Google Books are more convoluted.)

That settlement, however, applies only to the U.S. and a few other English-speaking countries. Reports surfaced a few months ago that Chinese authors were thinking about ganging up on Google, which is apparently in talks with representatives of those groups but has yet to reach a formal agreement.
Read the rest of Tom's report at CNet News online.

Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom.