Google is subpoenaing records from Yahoo! and MSN due to a lawsuit from two of the leading educational textbook publishers, McGraw-Hill and Authors Guild.These publishers have supported a book-scanning service for Search Engines which was adopted by Yahoo! and Google Book Search. Microsoft has also joined this alliance between search engines and books and plan to launch their service sometime the coming year!

Google Book Search allows users to search through millions of books which can prove to be useful to find books related to your search query. If they want, they can find the book in the local library or, for a fee, become a member and read the book themselves.

Anyway, the lawsuit claims that Google avoids the rights of the copyrights for the publishers. In an order to defend itself, Google is subpoenaing documents from Yahoo! and Microsoft to show that they have legal rights over the books which will be included in the Book Project.

Here are some of the sources where Google is subpoenaing documents from:

• Amazon
• Association of American Publishers
• Microsoft 
• Random
• Yahoo!

This does seem like a battle which, I believe, Google will lose. The details are still shady at the moment, but we will definitely find out more later!

Technorati Tags: Google, McGraw, Yahoo!