Google Wins Summary Judgment In Books Case

Full Copying to Make Search Snippets Available to End-Users Held Fair Use

Round one of the long-fought Google Books case has ended in a summary judgment victory for defendant Google. The Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York held yesterday that Google's copying, use, distribution and display of "snippets" from millions of books copied in their entirety constituted fair use and therefore did not infringe the authors' copyrights. The court further held that the use of digitized copies by the libraries that had provided Google with access to the works also constituted fair use. Author's Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc., Opinion (S.D.N.Y. , No. 05 Civ. 8136 (DC), November 14, 2013).

Key holdings on fair use:

Google's scanning and digitizing of entire books is transformative, weighing heavily in favor of fair use, because it facilitates searching, opens up new fields of research and analysis through data mining and text mining, and facilitates access to new audiences. That Google's use was commercial is of little significance since Google is not directly commercializing the works. Copying the entirety of books does not weigh heavily against fair use where the copying was necessary for the transformative search function and where end-users are not given access to the full text. The "effect on the market for the work" factor weighs heavily in favor of fair use where (1) plaintiffs do not show that the use is a substitution for the original work and (2) facilitating searches can increase sales by making more readers aware of the work, and links to booksellers make it easier for readers to purchase the work. Libraries' use of digitized copies is similarly fair use when they already own lawful hard copies of the works at issue. Procedural background

The war over Google's unauthorized copying of more than 20 million complete books began in 2005, and the relatively narrow purpose of that copying - to provide small excerpts and information about the books in response to searches - has often been overshadowed by the controversies concerning an attempted settlement of the case.

After the Google Books Settlement was rejected by the district court in 2011, and other settlement efforts failed, the case moved forward on the merits. In 2012, the Second Circuit stayed proceedings for an interlocutory appeal of the class certification, and then, in July 2013, vacated the class certification and remanded for the District Court to consider the...