Tag Archives: book-scanning

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Whatever you think of Google as a company, the book-scanning decision is the right one

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Mathew Ingram's avatarGigaom

On Thursday, U.S. Circuit Court Judge Denny Chin handed down a decision in one of the longest-running copyright cases in recent memory: namely, the lawsuit launched by the Authors’ Guild against Google (s goog), claiming that its book-scanning project amounted to a massive case of copyright infringement. Chin, however, ruled that the project is protected under the “fair use” principle, since there are clear public benefits to the indexing of millions of books.

Over the past few years (the case was originally launched in 2005) the Authors Guild has won support for its case from Google critics who believe that the web giant has amassed too much power — the same critics who have pushed for repeated antitrust investigations of the company’s quasi-monopoly in the search and internet-advertising markets, among other things.

But regardless of whether you believe Google is too big for its britches, and is trying to…

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Google wins book-scanning case: judge finds “fair use,” cites many benefits

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Jeff John Roberts's avatarGigaom

Google(s goog) has won a resounding victory in its eight-year copyright battle with the Authors Guild over the search giant’s controversial decision to scan more than 20 million books from libraries and make them available on the internet.

In a ruling (embedded below) issued Thursday morning in New York, US Circuit Judge Denny Chin said the book scanning amounted to fair use because it was “highly transformative” and because it didn’t harm the market for the original work.

“Google Books provides significant public benefits,” Chin wrote, describing it as “an essential research tool” and noting that the scanning service has expanded literary access for the blind and helped preserve the text of old books from physical decay.

Chin also rejected the theory that Google was depriving authors of income, noting that the company does not sell the scans or make whole copies of books available. He concluded, instead, that Google…

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