Chinese authors are claiming that Google has explicitly violated international copyright laws by taking works from US libraries, and then scanning those documents into the Google index.
“Google has seriously violated the copyrights of Chinese authors. That is an undeniable fact,” Chen Qirong, a spokesman for the China Writer’s Association, said.
However, Google claims that no violation has occurred because like other scanned books, they (being Google search results) only show a small snippet of text in the search results.
And because Google is showing only small amounts of writing, and they are not selling anything along side of the text, then there are no violations.
Google is sending a representative to be meet with Chinese copyright officials on Monday.