Looks like Google in trouble: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google8-2010apr08,0,2878875.story
But many Newspaper company are likely to doing the same. They have done this similar things to many personal sites and community. They had stolen images from someone privacy pages and claimed its their own. They had also stolen many contents from other ones and claimed its their own. They should look at themselves before bashing on others. I did not say Google did is absolute right. However, What Google and Microsoft are doing by copy those materials into image format should be looked as a way to maintain them. We all knows the paper format material is so fragile and cannot be kept for a very long period, like 100 years. If Google and Microsoft did not do, I bet those Newspaper company would done this instead.
In the future, google will own rights to everything that people still have some say over at the moment, you can see it going that way. Put it this way, if people are willing to document their lives online, ie: using facebook, twitter etc, then google will expect this of other areas of society too. I bet you that new worldwide laws will be passed in the future giving google full rights to information and digital media that most people would currently find unimaginable.
This has been coming for a long time. There has been several writes ups over the past few years this google book deal and how publishers were going to be suing google to stop it from publishing copyright protected books. Google said that if publishers did not want their works published, they "had" to opt out. Which goes against copyright law. The US department of justice is even involved.
As mentioned, this is an ongoing issue... It seems that the US just joined a rather large club, for as I write this there are lawsuits pending in various other countries vs Google Books. I believe that Google is already on trial in France... Google is a generally decent company, but the Google Books project is very, very bad news for writers, photographers, media corporations, and bookstores... And it will very likely do far more harm than good.
nothing new. It is even worse in europe, for example the "google tax": http://lafrance.com/content/google-tax
Google is a generally decent company, but Google Books project is very bad news for writers, photographers, media corporations and book stores.