Google wins book scan battle. Again. Can post pages online. Again

Google’s snippet feature – or snippet view, if you prefer – shows only a tiny portion of any given book at a time.

Google, whose parent company is now known as Alphabet, began its book-scanning project in 2004.

The Authors Guild and a few named plaintiffs-authors whose books appeared in the database without their permission-sued Google for copyright infringement. He’s an attorney with Boies, Schiller & Flexner who argued another fair-use case that was heavily cited in the Google case.

The firm scanned books submitted to it by libraries, in return for the libraries with the ability to make the digital copies obtainable to customers in restricted methods.

“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 goal, together with the absence of significant substitutive competition, as reasons for granting fair use”, the appeals court agreed this week.

According to reports, Google had estimated it could owe billions if it lost the case.

“We are seriously considering it”, Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild, told IBD via email. “In addition… Google allows readers to learn the frequency of usage of selected words in the aggregate corpus of published books in different historical periods”.

The ruling builds on a decision issued by the 2nd Circuit a year ago, when the appellate ruled that libraries that digitize books in order to make them searchable don’t infringe copyright. That ruling, and others like it, gave people confidence that institutions and companies would be able to scan books and expose the results without breaking the law, Butler said. The guild filed the lawsuit in 2005, shortly after the tech giant announced an ambitious digitization partnership with major libraries, claiming writers would lose money. The court said that it constituted fair use.

“The circuit court’s decision is a victory for the public”, said Raza Panjwani, policy counsel at Washington-based Public Knowledge Internet freedom advocacy group.

“Researchers can now spend seconds, not lifetimes, searching through libraries across the world to identify relevant books”.