Leading authors press for Supreme Court review of Google's digitised library | Books | The Guardian

"JM Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Malcolm Gladwell and Peter Carey are some of the major writers throwing their weight behind the US Authors Guild’s attempt to hold Google to account for its digitisation of millions of in-copyright works ... The authors, who also include Thomas Keneally, Ursula K Le Guin, Tracy Chevalier, Yann Martel and Richard Flanagan, write in their filing that “copyright protection was included in the constitution to reward authors and provide incentives for them to continue writing”, and that the fair use doctrine was not intended “to permit a wealthy for-profit entity to digitise millions of works and to cut off authors’ licensing of their reproduction, distribution, and public display rights. 'Although Google described its Books Library Project to the public as though it were a charitable endeavour … it was a vehicle to make searchable digital copies of over 20 million authors’ works (four million in copyright) available for searching,' write the authors. 'Paying for licences for those copies was not part of Google’s business model … By creating a search project that would draw people repeatedly to new searches, as one consults a dictionary, Google created a vehicle for creating new, advertising-bearing web pages that would enrich its advertising revenue' ..."