Google has won a major victory in the long legal fight over its scanning and searching of millions of books. A federal judge, Denny Chin, ruled on Thursday that Google’s use of copyrighted works in its Google Books program counts as fair use, and he dismissed a lawsuit originally brought by authors and publishers groups in 2005.
The publishers settled with Google in 2012, but the Authors Guild plaintiffs pressed ahead with their claims of copyright infringement.
Judge Chin’s opinion, delivered in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, resoundingly supported Google on the question of fair use. While the company did not seek permission to scan copyrighted works, the judge wrote, the uses made of those scans are “highly transformative"—a key element in fair-use determinations.
A Google representative said the company was “absolutely delighted” by the ruling. The decision will also thrill fair-use advocates and many academic librarians and researchers, especially those who want to mine the vast Google Books corpus for research. But the Authors Guild said it would appeal.
Judge Chin’s ruling detailed what he called the “many benefits” of Google Books and the several ways in which it can be seen as transformative. The program “has become an essential research tool” for librarians, scholars, and students, the judge wrote. It “greatly promotes” text mining, he noted, citing friend-of-the-court briefs filed by digital humanists and legal scholars. It gives “traditionally underserved populations,” including those who have trouble reading printed material, much broader access to books.
Google Books also “helps to preserve books and give them new life” by scanning and saving them. And it aids authors and publishers “by helping readers and researchers identify books,” Judge Chin wrote. “Google Books will generate new audiences and create new sources of income.”
All of those factors had led him to conclude that “Google Books provides significant public benefits” and does so “without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders,” he wrote. “Indeed, all society benefits.”
A ‘Challenge to Copyright’
Google says it has scanned more than 20 million books so far, in partnership with a number of academic libraries. Many of those books are under copyright. The Google Books program allows users to search the scanned books and see snippets of them but not their full texts—security measures that Judge Chin noted in his ruling.
“This has been a long road,” Google said in a short written statement reacting to the decision. “As we have long said, Google Books is in compliance with copyright law and acts like a card catalog for the digital age, giving users the ability to find books to buy or borrow.”
Although the latest ruling is good news for Google, the Authors Guild’s decision to appeal means the case may have more life left in it.
“We disagree with and are disappointed by the court’s decision,” Paul Aiken, the guild’s executive director, said in a written statement. “This case presents a fundamental challenge to copyright that merits review by a higher court. Google made unauthorized digital editions of nearly all of the world’s valuable copyright-protected literature and profits from displaying those works. In our view, such mass digitization and exploitation far exceeds the bounds of the fair-use defense.”
The case has been through many twists and turns. Judge Chin rejected a proposed settlement in 2011, saying it went too far and gave Google too great an advantage over its competitors.
Paul N. Courant, a former university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Michigan, has been closely involved in Google’s library-partnership program from the beginning. A professor of economics and public policy on the university’s Ann Arbor campus, he is also acting director of the University of Michigan Press.
“It’s a great outcome,” Mr. Courant said of Thursday’s ruling. “The notion that search is a transformative use is extremely important.”
Importance to Libraries
It’s significant, Mr. Courant said, that Judge Chin invoked a ruling handed down in another important fair-use case, also brought by the Authors Guild, against the HathiTrust Digital Library, which is based at the University of Michigan and counts some 60 other academic institutions as members. The HathiTrust libraries have been important partners in Google’s book-scanning efforts, receiving digital copies of books they allow Google to scan.
In 2012, Judge Harold Baer Jr. of the same U.S. District Court in Manhattan found that the HathiTrust libraries’ use of Google Books scans amounted to fair use. (The Authors Guild also appealed that decision; oral arguments were heard last month.)
Judge Chin wrote that Judge Baer’s fair-use conclusion “applies here as well to the libraries’ use of their scans, and if there is no liability for copyright infringement on the libraries’ part, there can be no liability on Google’s part.”
According to James Grimmelmann, a professor of law at the University of Maryland at Baltimore who has watched the case closely, Thursday’s ruling is a much better deal for researchers, for the public, and for the cause of fair use.
“This is good for anybody else making technological uses of copyrighted works. I have to think they are smiling at Georgia State,” Mr. Grimmelmann said, referring to a university that has been embroiled in its own long-running fair-use lawsuit with publishers over its posting of copyrighted material in e-reserves. (The judge in that case found mostly for the university in a decision handed down in September 2012; the plaintiffs said they would appeal.)
“I have to think that the HathiTrust libraries are thinking about other uses they could make of their works,” he continued. “I have to think that big-data start-ups are wondering what they can learn by mass-processing millions of copyrighted works.”
Early reaction from researchers and librarians to Thursday’s decision was enthusiastic. “A great day for fair use!” tweeted Matthew L. Jockers, a digital humanist who is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. “Let the text mining begin!”
