After books, google planning to scan magazines

Google is setting itself up for more controversy with  a patent application that was made public last week. The application is for technology that can read and split content from magazines and newspapers into individual articles that could be licensed. If the technology can be made to work it will raise similar issues for Google as the ones that came up around the Google books project .

Copyright holders will likely want to be compensated for the seperate articles. The same goes for photography that is featured in the articles. Whilst photography agencies were too late to join the parties in the book settlement there may still be opportunities here to find a reasonable solutions for all parties involved.

Application 20100040287 is titled Segmenting Printed Media Pages Into Articles. The company has already shown its interest in getting periodicals online as part of Google Books. But there are two problems. The technical one is tricky, as the application describes: via Google Patent Auto-Converts Print Publications to E-Articles | BNET Technology Blog | BNET.