I realise that this is most likely a simple question to those in the
know; unfortunately, I'm not especially knowledgeable about copyright
and Google's policies. Hopefully, someone here can offer answers and
perspectives.

As a hypothetical: say I am a private citizen, unattached to any
academic institution, interested in writing a book - hopefully, for
future commercial gain. I want to research what I am writing about, so
I use Google and other Google services such as Scholar and Books. I
search for terms using these services, get my results, click on them,
and use the websites I travel to in my book; or, I find useful
information in Scholar and Books pointing to journal articles and
monographs that I then seek out in a library and use.

Obviously, I need to request and gain permission from the copyright
holders of the websites I travel to, or of the articles or books I have
used in order to use their works in my own. But do I need to gain
Google's permission at any stage in the process because I have used
Google services to reach these sources?

Can't give you any authority for this, but if you are using google
merely to discover your material then you do not require their
permission or need to provide attribution. If it is a print
publication, you might acknowledge them (google that is) in the
acknowledgements section. If it is to be published on the web you "may"
run into difficulty with citation conventions and copyscape. Currently
trying to determine what the correct web conventions are for citing
external works which include small extracts with attribution. Unable to
find any authoritative statements as to google's requirements. Yet.

Thanks very much; I suspected it was something like this.

Can anyone else give confirmation of this, or state definitively
Google's position on this; or does anyone have contradictory
information?

I am interested in this subject for myself, so
can you expand on which area you are interested in

(a) You indicate your (input) sources are both print and electronic. In
which case Google is not involved.

If your (output) publication is
(b) Print, then again Google's involvement does not arise.
(c) Electronic, then
(d) MSN and Yahoo adopt a publish anyway policy and leave arguments up
to the two parties.
(e) Advice in this forum idicates Google uses copyscape to locate
duplicate/copied content and may not publish
(f) How Google differentiates between the copier and the copied I dont
know.
(g) there are strict protocols for citing external works ie HTML, MLA
and Columbia Style conventions. Even if you follow these copyscape
still seems to throw them out.

My input would be both print and electronic; again, of course, subject
to the permission of the copyright holders of the input.

So, I envisage searching Google Books - say, for "democracy" - and
coming across copyrighted works like "Democracy and Markets: the
Politics of Mixed Economics" by John R. Freeman (Cornell University
Press, 1989). I find a useful p***age on Books and so visit my local
public library (because Google Books only offers a "limited preview"),
borrow the book, take it home, and use it in a way substantial enough
to require permission from the copyright holder.

Similarly, I search for a term in Scholar, come across "Delegative
Democracy" by G. O'Donnell (Journal of Democracy, 1994), visit my
nearest national library to get the journal in question, note-take in a
substantial way, and require permission.

I also search Google web-search, and come across openDemocracy
(www.opendemocracy.net), and require permission to use their material
too.

Clearly, I would ask permission from Cornell University Press, the
Journal of Democracy, and opendemocracy.net to use their material
because (for argument's sake) they are the copyright holders. But
because I have found all these things through Google - two pointers to
library-held material, and one to a web page - does Google require
anything from me? A request for permission, perhaps?

My output would be print: that is, in monograph form, printed and
published in "hard format" as opposed to electronically.