Google Gets Total Victory Over Authors Guild: Book Scanning Is Fair Use | Techdirt

"This one has been a long time coming, but this morning, Judge Denny Chin (who actually has a long history of siding with copyright holders) found that Google's book scanning project is fair use. This is a huge victory in a variety of ways. Five years ago, we thought that Google made a huge mistake in dropping its fair use fight here, in trying to work out a "settlement," which would have harmed fair use by suggesting these kinds of things needed to be licensed, while also setting up a near de facto monopoly on digitizing books. Thankfully, that settlement got rejected, and the fair use argument went back into the courts. Actually, Judge Chin first focused on whether or not this should be allowed as a class action, but in a somewhat surprising move, the appeals court basically ignored that issue entirely and told Judge Chin to answer the fair use question first. He's now done so and it's a fantastic victory for fair use. The ruling relies on last year's ruling in the similar HathiTrust lawsuit, in which the Authors Guild sued a bunch of universities for banding together to scan books in their libraries. There, the court pointed out that this was clear fair use, and Chin finds the same here with Google ... Chin also rejects the idea that it can't be fair use just because Google is a commercial enterprise, noting that there are lots of commercial enterprises that rely on fair use, and also pointing out that it's not engaging in 'direct commercialization of the copyrighted works,' but those works lead to indirect commercial benefit. That's not enough to remove fair use, especially when 'the fact is that Google Books serves several important educational purposes.' Chin also 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 ... It all comes together in making a very strong argument that Google's book scanning promotes the progress of the arts and sciences just like copyright is supposed to do ... This is a huge win for the public, for science, for research and for most authors who will undoubtedly benefit from expanded search and discovery of their works. The Authors Guild, led by luddite Scott Turow, not only look completely out of touch, but they've wasted nearly a decade and a tremendous amount of their members' money on a completely wasted effort to impede the progress of science and knowledge. Isn't it time the Authors Guild had a boss who was forward-looking, rather than trying to pretend he can bring back the world that existed in the 1980s? Even worse, Turow famously is a practicing attorney, as well as a best-selling author. So it's not even like he can claim he was suckered into this by bad lawyers. He should have known better."