Brussels, September 07: Google, the Internet search group, defended its scanning and publishing of millions of books online on Monday by saying the project was making finding information on the Web more democratic.
The Californian company struck a deal with author and publisher groups in the United States earlier this year, allowing it to copy books for the Internet.
But the agreement has been criticised and come under the gaze of the U.S. Justice Department because it does not say what Google might charge libraries, for example. Some of them fear the service will become an expensive must-have.
Dan Clancy, architect of the Google programme, told a hearing at the European Commission, which is the European Union’s executive body, that the group hoped to allow Web surfers to find out-of-print books.
“We have seen a democratisation of access to online information,” said Clancy, engineering director of Google Book Search.
“You can discover information which you did not know was there,” he said. “It is important that these (out-of-print) books are not left behind. Google’s interest was in helping people to find the books.”
The EU said this year it would examine the Google deal in the United States after Germany said the company had scanned books from U.S. libraries to create a database without asking the authors.
—Agencies