However, Jonathan Zittrain, faculty co-director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, expressed none of Morris’s concerns over possible copyright infringement.
“This is what fair use is designed for,” he wrote in an e-mail earlier this year. “By showing only snippets, the market for the books themselves is not harmed.”
...AND ABROAD
But Google’s promises seem to have fallen on deaf ears in Europe, where libraries joined forces earlier this winter to resist the print project for a different reason.
The French have expressed concerns that the project will only foster America’s cultural imperialism, enhancing the dominance of the English language and Anglo-Saxon ways of thinking.
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the French national library, has since inspired 19 libraries to join the cause. The national libraries in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, and Sweden all signed and released an official oppositional statement soon after Google unveiled the project in December.
More than 20 national libraries out of the European Union’s 25 member states said that they wanted a European search engine.
HUL representatives insist that foreign literature is well-represented in Google’s digitization project.
“We are supportive of all digitization efforts because we believe everyone benefits when more information is available online,” said Susan Wojcicki, Google’s director of product development. Indeed, U.S. libraries in addition to Harvard, have already contributed a significant amount of material written in foreign languages.
In an April 29 editorial printed in the International Herald Tribune, Pierre Buhler, associate professor at the National Foundation of Political Science likewise criticized European attacks, particularly those of Jeanneney.
“What he called for was no less than the first culture war in cyberspace,” Buhler wrote.
—Staff writer Kimberly A. Kicenuik can be reached at kicenuik@fas.harvard.edu.