I recently wrote an article about how the Author’s Guild is suing Google over its Google Print project and how Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, had come out in favour of Google in this case.

Now it seems, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) have announced the filing of a lawsuit against Google over its plans to:

digitally copy and distribute copyrighted works without permission of the copyright owners

Google has previously responded to criticisms of Google print by the Author’s Guild by saying:

The use we make of all the books we scan through the Library Project is fully consistent with both the fair use doctrine under U.S. copyright law and the principles underlying copyright law itself, which allow everything from parodies to excerpts in book reviews.

and Google won’t be displaying the entire book in the search results, merely:

a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, mounted a vigorous defence of Google Print in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago and again, I have to say, I find his arguments perfectly reasonable.

Read his article and see for yourself.

I can see no merit in these suits and I only hope Google’s view prevails.