US Says Google Book Scanning Project Is Legal

The Guild argued that Google wrongfully deprived copyright holders of revenue, that Google was providing a substitute for legally protected books, and that by storing copies of books in digital form, Google would be exposing these works to hackers.

It ran into lawsuit over the act, but a panel made up of three judges in New York ruled that what the search engine is doing falls into the realm of fair use, reports Bloomberg. The Authors Guild said Google didn’t have the right to make copies of books under copyright, without the owners’ permission. In the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects.

The court said that the snippets made available by Google were not a viable substitute for the works and that it was immaterial if Google made a profit from its search business using the books.

The nature of the work that was protected under copyright law.

The opinion begins with a brief description of Google’s book scanning project, which started in 2004. Several of the books are non-fiction and many are out of print.

That allows the public to search for particular terms that might appear in a book (or not appear). Most of these books are non-fiction, and are out of print. The book scanning project is meant to provide internet users with a quick way to search books and includes links to where those books can be bought, Bloomberg notes. The court said that it constituted fair use. Google’s snippet feature – or snippet view, if you prefer – shows only a tiny portion of any given book at a time.

Transformative uses tend to favor a fair use finding because a transformative use is one that communicates something new and different from the original or expands its utility, thus serving copyright’s overall objective of contributing to public knowledge. But that didn’t kill its argument.

Google Books provides significant public benefits. The objective is to make information about the book available, not the information in the book. Like the district court, the circuit court also sided with Google. As Google describes it, Full View allows searchers to view the entire contents of a book and even download or save it on their computers.