Leval On Fair Use And Google Books: A Sketch Of A Story | Techdirt

Last night Judge Pierre N. Leval, a renowned fair use scholar and judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, delivered the Fourth Annual Peter A. Jaszi Distinguished Lecture on Intellectual Property (you can watch the recording at that link) at the law school where I teach, the American University Washington College of Law (whew). 'Lecture' doesn't really do it justice, though; Leval may have spoken in front of a lectern at a law school, but what he said was hardly dry or academic. Instead, it was a bravura exercise in storytelling, which is fitting, as storytelling and narrative are some of Peter Jaszi's favorite subjects, second only to fair use. Judge Leval recently authored the landmark opinion in Authors Guild v. Google, vindicating Google's massive digitization program which, in collaboration with research libraries all over the country, has made more than 20 million books full-text searchable and available for data-mining with the very cool Ngram Viewer. The opinion was the apotheosis of 25 years of fair use case law set in motion by Judge Leval himself in a 1990 law review article entitled 'Toward a Fair Use Standard.' Now here was the man himself, ready to talk about fair use in the digital age, and in honor of transformative use's most vociferous defender ..."