Beijing, China — Google has for long been engaged in a legal skirmishes with authors and publishers over its book scanning project. Recently, the global search titan has locked horns with Mian Mian, a popular Chinese author, who shot to fame with sensational tales of sex, drugs and alcohol in the underworld, is filing a lawsuit against Google in Beijing court, alleging that the company has scanned one of her most recent novels into the Google Books online database without her authorization.
Charging Google of copyright infringement, Mian Mian, said in a statement that her book, “Acid Lovers,” had been scanned by Google as part of its book digitization project.
After a two-hour proceedings, the court ordered both sides to sort out the matter but did not set any time-frame for reporting back, according to the author’s lawyer. The author is seeking compensations amounting to 61,000 yuan ($8,950; £5,576) and a public apology.
A Google spokeswoman in Beijing said the company had removed Mian’s works from Google’s library as soon as it heard of the lawsuit, but made no further comment on the case.
Sun Jingwei, the author’s lawyer said in a statement that the case — is the first civil lawsuit filed against Google in China over the scanning of books into its controversial web library — would open at a Beijing court on last Tuesday.
“Tomorrow afternoon at the Haidian court, representatives from both sides will hand over evidence,” Sun said. “After that I will be preparing our case and I figure that the actual trial will take place next year.”
Apart from Mian, representatives from the China Written Works Copyright Society has also accused Google of violating copyright law. It claimed that tens of thousands of books by several Chinese authors have been added to Google Books, and that talks with Google on the subject were “progressing well.”
Zhang Hongbo, the society’s deputy director-general, speaking to the state-run Global Times newspaper: “First we want Google to admit their mistake and apologize, then we can talk about compensation.”
“At the same time, we do not want Google to give up China in its digitized library project.”
Google China was not immediately available to comment.
The 39-year-old Mian Mian — who climbed to fame in 2000 with her novel “Candy,” a story about prostitutes, gangsters and artists in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen.
However, Mian Mian’s books have been translated into many languages but are largely banned in China, although they were widely available on the black market in the years following the publication of “Candy.”
Nevertheless, She is not alone in complaining about copyright issues raised by Google’s online library. Besides China, authors and publishers in United States, Germany, France etc have raised concerns over Google’s book scanning project.
In France, a court ordered Google to stop digitizing French books without the publisher’s approval. The search engine was also ordered to pay 300,000 euros ($430,000; £268,000) in damages and interest to French company La Martiniere, which had sued for copyright infringement for scanning book excerpts.
In the US, Google had reached a $125 million settlement with American authors and publishers over the copyright infringement law suit filed against it in 2005. But the settlement has come under scanner as it would give Google the monopoly to digitize millions of out of print books.
Earlier this month, Google’s French book search project suffered a legal setback after a Paris court ruled against the Internet search giant, thus ordering it to scan French works.
Commenting on the Google Books deal, digital media specialist Thomas Crampton said: “You might argue that they are the most innovative and they are building this platform first, and they are allowing people to access this information first … but they are coming up against a lot of copyright laws, most of which were written well before the internet era.”