Fair use prevails as Supreme Court rejects Google Books copyright case
Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement in US intellectual property law.
The
Supreme Court on Monday declined (PDF) to hear a challenge from
the Authors Guild and other writers claiming Google's scanning of their books
amounts to wanton copyright infringement and not fair use.
The
guild urged the high court to review a lower court decision in favor of Google
that the writers said amounted to an "unprecedented judicial expansion of the fair-use doctrine."
(PDF)
At
issue is a June decision (PDF) by the 2nd US Circuit Court of
Appeals that essentially said it's legal to scan books if you don't own the
copyright. The Authors' Guild originally sued Google, saying that serving up search results
from scanned books infringes on publishers' copyrights even though the search
giant shows only restricted snippets of the work. The writers also claimed that
Google's book search snippets provide an illegal free substitute for their work
and that Google Books infringes their "derivative rights" in revenue
they could gain from a "licensed search" market.
The
Supreme Court let stand the lower court opinion that rejected the writers'
claims. That decision today means Google Books won't have to close up shop
or ask book publishers for permission to scan. In the long run, the ruling
could inspire other large-scale digitization projects.
Fair
use is a concept baked into US copyright law, and it's a defense to copyright
infringement if certain elements are met. The US Copyright Office says
the defense is decided on a case-by-case basis. "The distinction between
what is fair use and what is infringement in a particular case will not always
be clear or easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or
notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of
the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission,"
the US Copyright Office says. There are, however, at least four factors that judges must consider when
deciding fair use: the purpose of use, the nature of the copyrighted
work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the
effect of the use upon the potential market.
The
Supreme Court did not comment in its order other than to say that Justice Elena
Kagan did not participate.
Google,
for its part, urged the justices to side against the writers because, in the
end, their works would be more readily discovered. "Google Books gives
readers a dramatically new way to find books of interest," Google's brief said. (PDF) "By formulating their own text
queries and reviewing search results, users can identify, determine the
relevance of, and locate books they might otherwise never have found."
Unlike
other forms of Google search, Google does not display advertising to book
searchers, nor does it receive payment if a searcher uses Google's link to buy
a copy. Google's book scanning project started in 2004. Working with major
libraries like Stanford, Columbia, the University of California, and the New
York Public Library, Google has scanned and made machine-readable more than 20
million books. Many of them are nonfiction and out of print.
Source
| http://arstechnica.com/
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
Upcoming Event | National Conference on
Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) during April 22-23,
2016.
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