Everyone’s talking about the weather nowadays, so you may not have heard about the latest kerfuffle involving Google. Seems the Authors Guild and a handful of individual authors have launched a suit against Google for what they call “massive copyright infringement”.

Google has a plan to make searching books as easy as searching the web. If I, for instance, was trying to locate a book about the origin of hot dogs, Google will give me a list of books that contain the words “hot dog” and “origin of the”. A snippet of the text around my search term is shown. A synopsis of the book, bibliographic info and table of contents are available to help me further decide if this is the text I’m looking for. Having determined that a specific book is the right one – links to booksellers and libraries help me to obtain a copy.

Publishers can sign up for the program, and providing Google with digitized copies of the text and accompanying info, benefit from direct links back to their site and display of their company logo. To obtain the text of books no longer in print or in the public domain, Google has struck deals with several Libraries to digitize their entire collections. Should a publishers or author not wish to participate, they may request a book be excluded from the search tool.

Google makes a good argument that the material they’re displaying is ‘fair use’. They’ve systems in place that – where the publisher has provided permission to read a full page – limit you to viewing a handful of pages from the same text. In any search of a copyrighted work, the amount of text shown is no more than you would see in a review or scholarly reference.

Where Google runs afoul of the Guild and authors is on a few technical points. In order to digitize the material – Google must effectively make a copy. Traditionally, to make such a copy, permission must be sought first. Instead, Google is going forth and insisting that authors who do not wish to take part must opt out.

The ‘opt out’ aspect is a significant issue. By putting the onus on the one making a copy to obtain permission, the author is freed from having to constantly and vigilantly police the use of their work. However, the flip-side to the law as currently writ is that in cases of orphaned works, where the author can not be identified or located, nobody can use the work. And in the instance of a project such as Google Print, where 20,000,000 books are to be scanned, the time and cost to locate and obtain permission for each work would make the project an impossibility.

As discussed by professor Lawrence Lessig, this is yet another of a growing number of cases where copyright laws are not in step with a digital world.

Could the Authors Guild really be so behind the times as to not recognize what a boon a search tool like Google Print would be for their members? Maybe I’m just cynical, but it would seem the Guild is trying to use the shortcomings of our current copyright laws as a way to try and squeeze hefty licensing fees out of Google for providing material that’s clearly ‘fair use’. I would hope that the 8000 authors who belong to the Guild recognize the stance their organization is taking for what it is.

There are 20 million books out there to choose from. Google is making it a snap to find the right one out of those 20 million. Personally, I can’t understand why an author would write a book and then not want it to be found.

I’m with O’Reilly on this – the economic scourge of creative professionals is NOT piracy. It’s obscurity.