Google’s Digital Library is legal, says USA appeals court

Google responded to author complaints by saying the ability to search books would not harm authors but help them by aiding readers in finding and choosing to buy volumes they might not have otherwise.

The appeals panel, made up of three judges, found that Google Books “tests the boundaries of fair use” but that the practice was allowed under the law.

Google’s digital copies of millions of books from around the world has always been controversial.

“Many of the most universally accepted forms of fair use, such as news reporting and commentary, quotation in historical or analytic books, reviews of books, and performances, as well as parody, are all normally done commercially for profit”, Leval wrote.

While we recognize that in a few circumstances, a commercial motivation on the part of
the secondary user will weigh against her… we see no reason in this
case why Google’s overall profit motivation should prevail as a reason for denying fair use over
its highly convincing transformative objective, together with the absence of significant
substitutive competition, as reasons for granting fair use. The court stated that while authors of works should benefit from their copyrights, the ultimate beneficiary should be the public. Snippet view was also deemed transformative as it added value to the search function’s new use-it tells researchers whether the book uses the term in a way that would induce her to obtain a copy of the book.

The Authors Guild sued in 2005 alleging that Google infringed copyrights by scanning and indexing books without writers’ permission.

In a statement, Google spokesman Aaron Stein said the project is like a “card catalog for the digital age”.

Many academic authors have backed the challenge to Google Books, while many academic libraries have welcomed Google Books.

Advocacy group Public Knowledge praised Friday’s ruling as a “victory for the public”.

Authors argued that the project violated their copyrights, even when Google offered the search and viewing entry with out cost, as a result of it supported Google’s dominance of the promoting-pushed Internet search enterprise.

She made it clear the Authors Guild planned to appeal the decision.

Google can now move forward with their book scanning project and digitize millions of e-books without having to pay authors.