The vast majority of books [Google is publishing online] belong to a third category: still protected by copyright, or of uncertain status, and out of print. These books are at the center of the conflict between Google and the publishers. Google is scanning these books in full but making only “snippets” (the company’s term) available on the Web. (Google searches turn up only the search term and about twenty words on either side of it.) Copyright law has never forbidden all “copying” of a protected work; scholars and journalists have long been allowed to quote portions of copyrighted material under the doctrine of fair use. Google maintains that the chunks of copyrighted material that it makes available on its books site are legal under fair use. “We really analogized book search to Web search, and we rely on fair use every day on Web search,” David C. Drummond, a senior vice-president at Google who is overseeing the response to the lawsuits, told me. “Web sites that we crawl are copyrighted. People expect their Web sites to be found, and Google searches find them. So, by scanning books, we give books the chance to be found, too.” (Google also has an “opt out” policy, which allows copyright holders to request that specific titles be omitted from the company’s database.)
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