UPDATED 03:05 EDT / NOVEMBER 15 2013

NEWS

Google crushes Authors Guild in long-running book scanning dispute

For almost a decade, the Authors Guild has waged a bitter war against Google and its massive book search engine project, accusing it of violating copyrights on an industrial scale by scanning the pages of millions of books and uploading these to the web. Google fought back hard, arguing that it’s Books project is actually performing a service to society, whilst respecting author’s rights at the same time. And now, that war has finally been settled.

So who’s right? According to U.S. Circuit Court Judge Denny Chin, Google is.

Google’s problems began almost eight years ago, when it first conceived the idea of uploading the world’s most important books onto the web. When it started, the search giant was under no illusions that securing the approval of copyright holders would be a logistical nightmare. It’s not just the fees that major publishers would demand that had Google worried – with many older titles, it would be hard to determine who the appropriate copyright holder really was. Henceforth, Google simply decided not to bother at all, scanning libraries of books without permission whilst gambling that the ‘fair use’ doctrine would justify its decision.

Now, that gamble has finally paid off, with Judge Chin ruling that Google was in the clear. In his ruling, Chin lauded the public benefits of the Google Books project, saying that its transformative use of copyrighted books was legal under the fair use doctrine.

Google was always likely to emerge as the victor in this case. Few people consider the fact that the basic Google search engine is based on a similar legal theory as it only shows ‘excerpts’ from websites in its search results. Google’s book search engine doesn’t actually publish entire books, though it does make most pages available, and so the legal principle is not too dissimilar.

Not that every author agreed. Led by the Authors Guild, a coalition of authors and publishers launched a legal battle against Google that would rumble on for an exhaustive eight years. Back in 2011, Judge Chin rejected a proposal by the publishers to use a class-action settlement to create a de facto Google Book monopoly in 2011, forcing them to settle with Google soon afterward. But the Authors Guild pressed on with the fight, and its only come to a conclusion this week.

In his ruling (available here), Chin points out that these book scans do not act as a market replacement for the books, and actually says that the very argument that it does doesn’t make sense:

“Google does not sell its scans, and the scans do not replace the books. While partner libraries have the ability to download a scan of a book from their collections, they owned the books already — they provided the original book to Google to scan. Nor is it likely that someone would take the time and energy to input countless searches to try and get enough snippets to comprise an entire book. Not only is that not possible as certain pages and snippets are blacklisted, the individual would have to have a copy of the book in his possession already to be able to piece the different snippets together in coherent fashion.”

Another important point in the case was whether or not Google’s use of the books it scans can be considered “transformative”. According to Judge China, Google passed this test with flying colors:

“Google Books digitizes books and transforms expressive text into a comprehensive word index that helps readers, scholars, researchers, and others find books. Google Books does not supersede or supplant books because it is not a tool to be used to read books.”

One more factor that weighed in Google’s favor is that the project actually expands the market for books, as it helps consumers to discover titles that they may not have known existed.

The Authors Guild says that it plans to appeal the ruling, but if its upheld it would be a significant triumph not just for Google, but for fair use rights too, and that would benefit many others. These days, numerous media companies carry out innovative projects that involve indexing or aggregating indexed content, and today’s decision is the clearest statement so far that these projects are in the clear.

photo credit: ginnerobot via photopin cc

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU