A group of nonprofit scholarly publishers has pointed out the copyright-violation potential of Google Print for Libraries, a project to digitize some university library collections, InfoWorld reports (via PaidContent). In a letter sent to Google Friday, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) said its 125 member publishers are concerned about possible misuse of their copyrighted content. Google Print for Libraries "appears to involve systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale," according to the letter.

Google will make the digitized texts searchable on Google, and users would be able to view the full text of books in the public domain, but only "a few sentences" of copyrighted books, according to Google's website.

The AAUP letter asks how Google intends to protect the copyrighted works from misuse, and how publishers can expect to protect their copyrighted work if a future Google owner were to decide to directly "exploit" the works.