Google Books Case Dismissed On Fair Use Grounds 124
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a case of major importance, the long simmering battle between the Authors Guild and Google has reached its climax, with the court granting Google's motion for summary judgment, dismissing the case, on fair use grounds. In his 30-page decision (PDF), Judge Denny Chin — who has been a District Court Judge throughout most of the life of the case but is now a Circuit Court Judge — reasoned that, although Google's own motive for its "Library Project" (which scans books from libraries without the copyright owners' permission and makes the material publicly available for search), is commercial profit, the project itself serves significant educational purposes, and actually enhances, rather than detracts from, the value of the works, since it helps promote sales of the works. Judge Chin also felt that it was impossible to use Google's scanned material, either for making full copies, or for reading the books, so that it did not compete with the books themselves."
love J. Chin's fair use analysis (Score:5, Informative)
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. 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.
Depending on how Chin's decision stands up on the inevitable appeal, this paragraph has probably given us some very useful & explicit design considerations to incorporate in projects likely to face similar claims of copyright violation.
Re:Lost opportunity (Score:5, Informative)
The idea here is to protect stuff like a critic quoting a bits of a book/movie in their discussion of a piece without violating the copyright of that book/movie. If it weren't for the 'snippet' view that prevents easy access to 100% of each scanned book, that factor would have weighed against google here, not for them. While one can only speculate whether that would have been enough to change the outcome, it is a certainty --the judge explicitly describes how, if you're interested-- that google's presentation of less than 100% of the scanned works helped secure this decision.
Re:Why can't I? (Score:5, Informative)
Traditionally you could. If you owned a book or a tape or a record, you traditionally could make copies of it for your own personal use without needing permission. Collecting your favorite songs onto a single tape, or copying your records onto tape to listen to them in the car, or making copies so the originals wouldn't get worn, were all considered perfectly OK things to do as long as if you sold the original those copies either went to the buyer or got destroyed. It's only been very recently that copyright holders have been trying to claim that you can't do any of that.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Informative)
Even if you think that Google is Damien's evil brother, this is the right damn decision.
Agreed, and reading from the full text of the decision, its hard to see what the Authors Guild is all about.
You can't get the full text of a copyrighted work from google, no matter how hard you try. You get
snippets, not complete pages, and not snippets from all the pages.
Further, most of the Author's guild whining was all about the fact that Google is a for profit company.
Yet the decision clearly considers this:
Here, Google does not sell the scans it has
made of books for Google Books; it does not sell the snippets
that it displays; and it does not run ads on the About the Book
pages that contain snippets. It does not engage in the direct
commercialization of copyrighted works.
Google does, of course, benefit commercially in the sense that
users are drawn to the Google websites by the ability to search
Google Books. While this is a consideration to be acknowledged
in weighing all the factors, even assuming Google's principal
motivation is profit, the fact is that Google Books serves
several important educational purposes.
Re:Spent a lot of money to help us (Score:5, Informative)
But that's just it, they don't show ads down the sides when showing you snippets.
Go search for a quote from any book, and look at the snippets.
You will see links to places you can buy the book, as well as libraries that have it.
That's really all.
Re:love J. Chin's fair use analysis (Score:5, Informative)
The benefits Google Books and full text search provides are only ONE Part of the judgement, and not even the most important part.
The key finding was that Google does not provide the full text of the books, can't be tricked into giving the full text of the book,
and actually contains links to where the book can be legally purchased (or borrowed from a library).
Even those books that are out of print will not be shown in full text if it is still under copyright.