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Google accused of breaching copyright rules

The internet search group Google has been accused of breaching copyright rules on a massive scale through a plan to make the contents of university libraries easily available to anyone with an online connection. This report from Mark Gregory:

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Last year Google announced deals with five of the world's top universities, including Harvard and Oxford, to scan much of the contents of their libraries into the internet. The idea was to make millions of important but previously inaccessible texts available to researchers everywhere with a few clicks of the mouse.
The head of Oxford University's library service said the project could turn out to be almost as important as the invention of the printing press. Google meanwhile claimed its motives were purely altruistic, the realisation of a longstanding dream for the group's billionaire founders Sergey Page and Larry Brin who'd worked on a digital library project during their student days.

But from the start Google's plan met opposition. The latest sign of this is a letter to Google from the American Association of University Presses which represents non profit making academic publishers. The organisation wants clarification on sixteen issues, claiming the book scanning scheme appears to involve systematic infringment of copyright on a massive scale.

Other opposition has come from France, where there are fears that the Google project will enhance of the dominance of the English language and Anglo-Saxon ways of thinking. France and several other European countries recently got EU backing for a rival book scanning project for works not in English.

Supporters of the Google scheme say copyright is protected because many of the works being initially scanned in are old texts not by living authors, and where copyright is an issue only a list of the contents and a few sentences from the text will be available on the internet.

Mark Gregory, BBC

Listen to the words
inaccessible
difficult or impossible to reach or find

turn out to be
become

altruistic
caring more about others than oneself

the realisation of a longstanding dream
the fulfillment of a dream that somebody has had for a long time

founders
people who started an organization or an institution

met opposition
if something meets opposition from somebody, this person strongly disagrees with it

clarification
the process of making things clearer or easier to understand

infringment of copyright
breaking of somebody's (for example, a book author's or a composer's) right to be paid for publishing or performing their work

backing
support

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