Judge Dismisses Authors’ Lawsuit Against Google Books

"In what analysts are describing as a big win for scholars and libraries, federal circuit court judge Denny Chin today dismissed a lawsuit against Google brought by the Author’s Guild claiming that the company had violated copyrights by digitizing millions of books and making short samples of the works available via its Google Books service. In the decision, Chin stated that Google Books provided “significant public benefits” and that the digitized works were protected by the principle of fair use. Google has been scanning books into its searchable online database since 2004, while the Author’s Guild has been suing over the practice for nearly that long, bringing its case against the tech giant in 2005. The Guild’s case took a hit in July of this year, when the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals stripped the case of its class action status, a ruling that many industry watchers saw as strengthening Google’s case that its actions were covered under the fair use umbrella. For a comprehensive history of this long and winding case, you can take a look at past roundups here, here, and here, courtesy of infoDOCKET’s Gary Price. Today, Judge Denny Chin granted a motion filed by Google more than a year ago, in which it argued that author’s copyrights were not damaged by having their titles digitized into Google Books, as readers could not peruse the entire book, but only explore selections from it. In order to read the whole thing, Google argued, 'readers still must buy a book from a store or borrow it from a library.' In the opinion issued today, Judge Chin agreed that Google Books is not a place where readers can go to pirate books but a tool to help people find books that may be of interest to them. Chin cited libraries as a particular beneficiary, noting that “Google Books has become an essential research tool, as it helps librarians identify and find research sources, it make the process of interlibrary lending more efficient, and it facilitates finding and checking citations.” Attorney Jonathan Band, who penned a friend of the court brief on behalf of the Library Copyright Alliance, said that independent of larger question of fair use policy, those factors make the decision a good one ... "