Microsoft hits Google over book search model
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(InfoWorld) - A Microsoft attorney will attack Google's book search service in a speech Tuesday to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), saying Google is misappropriating principles of fair use to further its own business model. Thomas Rubin, Microsoft's associate general counsel, will address the AAP's annual meeting in New York, stating that while Microsoft's Live Search Books honors copyright protection and fair use, Google's Book Search abuses it. "In my view, Google has chosen the wrong path for the longer term, because it systematically violates copyright and deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works," Rubin said in a copy of the speech posted on the Web site of The Wall Street Journal. Rubin also addressed the issue in a commentary written for Monday's edition of The Financial Times. "Google defends its actions primarily by arguing that its unauthorized copying and future monetization of your books are protected as fair use," the speech says. At issue is Microsoft's contention that Google has taken the position that it may scan, catalog, and display content published in book form under fair use principles unless the copyright right holders tells them not to. Rubin also says in his speech that Google then profits from material to which it does not own the copyright by running advertising along with it. He says that Microsoft seeks and receives permission from all publishers of copyrighted material before including it among titles that can be searched. A search for Ernest Hemingway's novel "The Old Man and the Sea" on Google Book Search brought up noÂ ads on the results page, but inserted one ad below four pages of scanned text. In contrast, Microsoft's Live Search Books, currently being beta-tested, brought up only one title in its search results, a book called "Search and Struggle for Quality and Independence," which cites Hemingway's tale as a reference. No advertising appears on the results page or the book's page. Rubin calls Google's attitude towards copyright protection "weak at best" and cites accusations leveled atÂ Google-owned YouTubeÂ over failure to remove copyrighted material as proof of that. "Anyone who visits YouTube, whichÂ Google purchased last year, will immediately recognize that it follows a similar cavalier approach to copyright," said Rubin. Google did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The U.S. Copyright Office defines "fair use" on its Web site as: "quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported." Â
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Google Works with Libraries to Search Book Collections  Google is taking its searchers away from the bookstore, and back to the library. Google today announced that it is working with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford as well as The New York Public ...
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Microsoft Corp. is set to unleash its much-anticipated search technology on Thursday, as it ramps up efforts to take on market leader Google Inc.
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Description: This week, the search engine Google announced plans to digitize millions of library books and make them searchable online.
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Pot and kettle debate cleanliness Microsoft executive Tom Rubin will use a speech to the American Association of Publishers, which is suing Google, to slag off the search engine's attitude to copyright.â¦
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While senior Microsoft executives pit the company against Google in a looming Internet search war, the Redmond, Washington-based company has begun offering a Google search tool for download from the Microsoft.
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Microsoft is set to unleash its much-anticipated search technology this week, as it ramps up efforts to take on market leader Google.
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Will heavy pocketbooks help Microsoft strangle Google?
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Microsoft's books search engine has expanded to include some copyrighted works in its index. Results containig copyrighted material were first made available Thursday evening.
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(InfoWorld) - Google is making its controversial Book Search engine available to publishers interested in putting it on their Web sites. This is the first time Google's Book Search service has been available outside of its main site in the Google.com domain. This co-branded search program benefits Google because the search engine will now be available more broadly. Meanwhile, publishers benefit by offering an additional search service to their Web site visitors. Publishers can tailor the index of their search engine so that only books published by them show up in the query results, Google said Friday. As in the main Book Search site, these result pages give users the option to link to online shops that sell the listed books. Interestingly, one of the publishers that put Book Search on its Web site is The McGraw-Hill Companies. Along with other major publishers, McGraw-Hill is suing Google for copyright infringement over Google's ongoing project to scan millions of copyright books without permission. Although McGraw-Hill's position may seem at first contradictory, it stems from the fact that Google's Book Search service has two main pieces. One focuses on securing formal partnerships with publishers, obtaining their permission to scan books and giving them control over how much of those books can be displayed by Google for free. McGraw-Hill is one of about 10,000 publishers that participate in this partner program with Google that have collectively made available about 1 million titles for scanning so far, said Tom Turvey, director of Google Book Search partnerships. About 50 publishers have embedded Book Search in their sites already, and many more are in line to do so, Turvey said. McGraw-Hill didn't immediately reply to a request for comment. Simultaneously, McGraw-Hill objects to the other portion of the Book Search operation, in which Google partners with major academic libraries to scan large portions of their collections. Those library scanning operations often involve copyrighted books, which Google is digitally copying without obtaining permission from publishers and authors.
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Microsoft launched an unusually caustic public broadside yesterday against Google, accusing its archrival of running roughshod over copyrights as it creates an online service for searching books.
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Software giant Microsoft Tuesday launched a stinging attack on Google, accusing its Internet rival of riding roughshod over copyright in a rush to grab content for its own commercial benefit.
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In the last couple of months, we have seen Google invading the Microsoft territory with GMail and Google Desktop Search. Now Microsoft is responding.
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Controversial book search engine can be co-branded and embedded on publishers' sites.
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Microsoft launched its own Internet search engine in a move aimed at challenging market leaders Google and Yahoo.
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Coinciding with the preview of Microsoft's new MSN Search, Google has announced its search index has nearly doubled to a massive 8 billion documents. The company says users will now find more results on obscure topics that previously returned just a handful of Web pages. The new index places Google's search scope far beyond its rivals, but as Google V.P. of Engineering Bill Coughran notes, "The real test is how well we do in finding what you want from within those pages. We'll keep improving that too."
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Internet search giant Google, quiet since going public in August, introduced a feature Wednesday that lets users search through pages of books online.