A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Friday released its opinion in Authors Guild v. Google, delivering a 3-0 win for defendant. Libraries at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library and the University of Oxford were the first to participate in Google’s books digitization project. The ruling promises to help Mountain View, California-based Google retain its dominance in online searches. Google already scanned more than 20 million of books. Under its plan it won’t make copies of the books available, but only provide a short excerpt and a link to where people can buy the book, or borrow it from a library. “The objective of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals”.
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“The authors sued Google, whose parent company is now named Alphabet Inc, in 2005, a year after the project was launched”.
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The district court granted 8 summary judgment based on its conclusion that Google’s copying is fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107 and is therefore not infringing. The group said Google Books violates authors’ rights to control their works. “Google’s commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use”.
