Google’s battle with the Authors Guild dates to 2005, when the Authors Guild alleged that the search company infringed copyright with its ambitious initiative to digitize library books and make snippets available to searchers.
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On Friday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in an a long-running dispute over Google’s efforts to scan tens of millions of books.
In recognizing that Google Books is fair use, Judge Leval reminds us that each case must be considered on its facts and articulates how considering arguments that a second work has a transformative objective requires complex thought and investigation.
However, the Authors Guild appealed the ruling handed out by Judge Chin in 2013.
“We’re pleased the court has confirmed that the project is fair use, acting like a card catalogue for the digital age”, a Google spokesperson said.
In addition, the court said, the scanning project does not expose the authors “to an unreasonable risk of loss of copyright value through incursions of hackers”.
While Google does have a snippet feature, which shows a tiny portion of a book, as such, the court ruled that reading an entire book using this feature would be unrealistic. When an individual searches for a book, Google presents information about the title, very often with snippets of texts from the book. It planned ultimately to scan over 100 million books, including material from the New York Public Library, Library of Congress and several major universities. The ruling also gives us a new test of the idea of “fair use” of copyrighted content for the era, in which we increasingly expect to find everything online including the kitchen sink. The court also approved Google’s Library Project, which provides digital copies of books for participating research libraries.
The Authors Guild argued that the Google Books project is “quintessentially commercial in nature”, and it is meant to expand the company’s business. They appeal from the grant of summary judgment in Google’s favor.
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The fair use result should please a few critics of the earlier settlement who saw it as edging towards giving Google a monopoly on digitized books.
