On Friday, October 16th 2015, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Google's enormous project for scanning millions of books into digital format does not violate copyright provisions, but is instead, fair use of that material under United States law. Google first started their ambitious endeavor back in 2004, but were sued by individual authors and the Author's Guild for infringement just a year later. Google and the plaintiffs came to a preliminary settlement of $125 million dollars, but that was negated by the judge at a lower level court as being unfair to the authors. The Association of American Publishers came to a separate agreement with Google, and Google changed their methods slightly as part of that agreement, making smaller portions of the books available online for free, and removing scanned books on request.
Today's ruling is a major victory for Google, and greatly strengthens Fair Use under US copyright provisions. In a unanimous decision, the three judge panel ruled that, "Google's making of a digital copy to provide a search function is a transformative use, which augments public knowledge by making available information about Plaintiffs' books without providing the public with a substantial substitute for matter protected by the Plaintiffs' copyright interest in the original works or derivatives of them,"
Google only provides snippits of the original work, not the entire book, so that it is possible to review sections and see if the material meets one's needs. "Google’s division of the page into tiny snippets is designed to show the searcher just enough context surrounding the searched term to help her evaluate whether the book falls within the scope of her interest (without revealing so much as to threaten the author’s copyright interests)," Circuit Judge Pierre Leval wrote in the ruling by the court.
Even though Google has a financial stake in the use of this material, and "stretched the boundaries of fair use," it was not enough to negate the positive aspects of their project.
You can read more on the story at Reuters.
