Amazon's New Full Text Search for Books Raises Concerns over Copyright Infringement

Amazon.com recently introduced a new feature to enable book shoppers to conduct full-text searches of more than 120,000 books sold on its online store.   In addition to displaying matches for books based on title, author, or publisher, search results using Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" feature will produce a list of books containing the search term and provide excerpts from the text.   Users can follow links from the excerpts to view the specific page of a book in its entirety.   This feature will also allow users to browse forward and back two pages from the linked page. Shortly after the introduction of the new feature, critics raised concerns over copyright infringement in authors' works.   Although a limit has been set so that users will not be able to view more than 20 percent of any given book, the ability to print even that percentage of a particular book could carry a potential for copyright infringement. For example, The Authors Guild, a professional organization representing US authors, tested the feature and found that they could print 108 consecutive pages of a best-seller. The Guild noted that this was a particular concern for authors of books containing cooking recipes or travel guide information, where information is segregated into shorter sections. In a move interpreted by some as a response to concerns about the risk of eroding sales or the potential for copyright infringement, Amazon disabled the print function from the Search Inside the Book feature shortly after the launch the new program.   For more information, visit: http://news.com.com/2102-1032_3-5102917.html?tag=st_util_print; http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60948,00.html; or http://www.authorsguild.org/news/amazon_blocks_printing.htm. Summary by:   Nicholas Wong