Google Print is back

Google has decided to continue with their plans of digitizing the content available in some of the biggest libraries in the world. Google Print is due to resume from tomorrow in spite of the fact that the company has been hit by two separate lawsuits claiming that the program breaks copyrights of the authors of the books.

Google Print is now scheduled to restart from November 1 after they suspended the process to give the publishers and authors enough time to contact the company if they objected to having their books stored in Google’s database. The deadline is now over and the Google Print program would continue as originally planned.

Major publishers represented by the Association of American Publishers had earlier sued Google this month for digitizing books without the permission of copyright holders. They claimed that Google should have contacted them regarding the copyrights of the content they owned. Before that, Google was sued by the Authors Guild for a similar reason.

Google continues to claim that their program adheres to fair use clause of the U.S. Copyright Act that allows for the reprinting of portions of copyrighted material for certain purposes. Interestingly, now both Yahoo! and Microsoft MSN have announced similar plans to digitize books but they are only targeting books, which are outside the copyright issues.