Court sides with Google Books

A federal court has ruled that Google did not violate copyrights by indexing and excerpting millions of written works for its Google Books project. Mountain View had argued that its efforts to digitize the books and display “snippets” of content in search results constituted fair use and didn’t require permission from rights holders. The Authors Guild sued but today, U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin sided with Google.

Chin granted the company’s motion for summary judgment and described Google Books as a valuable public service in his opinion:

“In my view, Google Books provides significant public benefits. It advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders,” Chin wrote.

“It has become an invaluable research tool that permits students, teachers, librarians, and others to more efficiently identify and locate books. It has given scholars the ability, for the first time, to conduct full-text searches of tens of millions of books. It preserves books, in particular out-of-print and old books that have been forgotten in the bowels of libraries, and it gives them new life. It facilitates access to books for print-disabled and remote or underserved populations. It generates new audiences and creates new sources of income for authors and publishers. Indeed, all society benefits.”

While Chin is clearly a fan, it would be false to think of Google Books as a venture in altruism. The court’s ruling comes after a rejected settlement offer that would have allowed Google to sell copies of “orphan works,” whose copyright holders cannot be located.

Google Books was announced in 2004 at the Frankfurt Book Fair and immediately became a cause of controversy. By 2005, the company was already fighting at least two infringement lawsuits and would soon be sued for copyright violations in several foreign courts. Today, Google Books stores more than 30 million scanned works. 

Google isn’t the only organization working on digitizing written content. The Internet Archive scans more than 1000 books each day while also mirroring content from Google Books.