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Google Books Case Dismissed On Fair Use Grounds
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."
Google spent a lot of money to help us find books. I really don't mind seeing ads down the side while I search. They are not preventing anyone else from spending lots of money to do the same thing.
Fair return is whatever they can get based on demand and desire.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If google can legally copy books (even when profit is involved) then why can't I do the same?
Wouldn't I get hammered with copyright infringement problems if I scanned in books I did not author myself?
Suddenoutbreakofcommonsense
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.
One of the four factors used in the copyright statute to determine whether or not a use is fair use is: "The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole"
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.
So, if this stands does this mean it's lawful for Google to make the full text available of these books, or not?
Fair use cases are very fact specific. If you start monkeying with the facts, Judge Chin might not feel the same way about it.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
I'm going through awful problems right now trying to get a copy of a 1776 book which was microfilmed ages ago
Just out of curiosity, what book are we talking about here?
The Joy of Revolutionary Sex.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Google is not just copying anything, and everything, they want.
If it was any other company, it would have probably never even gone to court.
> I don't mind people who did both processes getting a fair return but we need to decide what a fair return is.
It's 9.8%. Over the long term, they'll average 9.8% per year and there's nothing we can do to change that.
Suppose for a moment that there was a very high return. Let's say 50%.
Microsoft and their Bing divison, along with Amazon and others would be watching that and thinking:
We have $50 million dollars to spend on our next project.
We can either spend that on developing a game console, with an expected return of 2%, or
on digitizing books, with a return of 50%.
Fire up the digitizer!
People generally invest in the type of projects that are getting the best returns. So due to the 50% return, you'd have Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all offering different versions of the service. Maybe Microsoft would have no ads, but it would only work in IE11 on Windows 8.1.
Amazon's would be similar to Google, but with fewer, more obtrusive ads for full books that float over the digital pages.
With two competitors, Google's return would decrease. Specifically, new entrants keep coming in with different (better, cheaper, etc.) versions as long as the return is higher than other projects. It turns out that "other projects" return 9.8%, on average. So anything with a risk-adjusted return higher than 9.8% draws competitors.
If money goes IN to lines of business where it'll make more than 9.8%, where does it come FROM? From shutting down (or foregoing) operations that make less, of course. Any business with a risk-adjusted return less than 9.8% has some providers leave the market for greener pastures.
With the competitors close, their market share goes to the remaining competitors, so the remaining people get increased returns. Specifically, competitors keep leaving and the return keeps increasing until the return is as good as other options - about 9.8%.
So that's what you end up with - in the long term, any industry in the US has a risk-adjusted return of about 9.8%. Some, like oil or farming, are subject to high volatility - good years and bad years. Exxon for example is affected by oil prices, so it goes up and down. Exxon averaged 11.62% over the last 10 years, 7.86% over the last 15 years - everything swings up and down around that 9.8% mark.
"50 Shades of Red White and Blue"? Or was it that Loyalist best-seller "Deep Throne"?
Google limits the amount of pages you can view on media with active copyrights. It is tied to your IP which remains blacklisted for some time (months?). It would be possible to get a full copy if you could get around the blacklisting but that's more trouble than just getting a copy of the book in the first place.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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.
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Generally, you CAN copy a whole book, it isn't necessary to claim you only read a few pages.
You can copy it and read all of it, or copy a whole album on tape and then listen to the whole album.
What you can't do is sell whole copies.
Yes, that's a three sentence summary of 100 pages of law, so of course there are more details than that.
I'm sorry, but did you miss what happened with a guy named Aaron Schwartz?
Schwartz was not working from legal copies obtained by legal means.
Nor was he providing snippets, but rather whole texts.
He wasn't even arrested for copyright infringement.
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President Obama is drafting a response to be teleprompted tomorrow.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Google was guilty of breaking into facilities they don't own, hacking a computer network, and releasing every page of every book ever printed???
Last time I checked, the facts were that: (1) Swartz had free and open access to both the building and the closet in which he placed his computer, (2) any hacking he did amounted to (possibly) changing his MAC address and violating terms of service, and (3) none of the material he downloaded was released by him to the public. Have any reliable sources to contradict this?
Schwartz was not working from legal copies obtained by legal means.
You are ignoring facts to make such a statement, primarily that he was not found guilty of anything. He was allowed access to a buildings, allowed access to a network, and was allowed access to the documentation he was downloading. The people requesting prosecution were not the authors, but a DRM company making a profit off the materials. Most of the documentation Aaron was downloading was public domain with no Copyrights, being hoarded by the same DRM company. Even after he was asked not to copy, there was no enforcement and no protections added. It's really too bad he committed suicide, it would have been nearly impossible to convict him which is why the prosecution was trying to threaten him into a plea..
The next two statements are factual, but does not change the case nor my statements. Google does not provide only snippets either, at least in things I have tested (which admittedly was a couple years back). I may have to change a URL or perform a few searches, but they are scanning all of the data and not just a snippet.
I agree that the cases are not identical. That said, it's preferential treatment that _nobody_ else has received and there is no expectation that anyone would receive such treatment.
Didn't we just have a case here yesterday where Lyric sites providing only lyrics were going to be shut down because of copyrights and making ad revenue from those sites? The reason to mention that is because even if Google was only using snippets, another precedent being set claims you can not make revenue off of even a portion of copyrighted material.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Just go read the Judges ruling.
You clearly don't have a clue about how the Google books search works. You are talking nonsense.
Nobody said google was only USING snippets. Google will only GIVE YOU snippets.
Just like the librarian that won't let you copy a whole book but will let you copy a coupe pages.
Google doesn't SELL these snippets. There is no advertising on the pages that contain Snippets.
There are unpaid links to stores that sell the book you are looking at. And some libraries that are
known to have a copy.
READ WHAT THE JUDGE SAID FOR CHRISTS SAKE.
Its a court ruling. Anyone who wants to copy google's model, in whole or in part can point to that ruling in court.
Unless or until it is overturned, it is the law of the land.
Please, I beg you, go read the ruling. You are making an idiot of yourself on the internet.
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What they're "about" is, google has lots of Beeeeeellions of dollars laying around, and since they already did this, might as well make a grab at some of their cash. Regardless of if google's actions even harm them.
In the end, their greed cost them a bunch of legal expenses, whereas the moral high ground would have permitted them instead to focus on the free promotional value.
But can I go to your house, copy your books (with your permission), and then take my copies with me?
Yes.
But I could get in trouble if I invite you over specifically for that purpose, or if I charge you a fee, or if I advertise to my friends that they can come and copy my books. This is exactly the same as copying of cassette tapes, and making cassette tapes of radio broadcasts.
You ARE allowed to share with your friends in a very limited way. But it has to be like, your friend is already visiting, and asks to make a copy, and makes the copy themselves.
Lyrics are a separately copyrighted work.
The copyright holder is in most cases not the person who even wrote, sang, or recorded the song.
Again you don't even understand what we are talking about here.
Click this link to show a typical google books text search so you can at least be vaguely acquainted with the topic under discussion http://tinyurl.com/p4xq4w9
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Of course we have the right (in the US) to record broadcasts for the purposes of timeshifting, but not necessarily to give a copy to a friend. [citation]
[citation needed]
Kid-proof tablet..
You can't get the full text of a copyrighted work from google, no matter how hard you try.
You may not be able to get the full text of the copyrighted work, but Google can and has. Google are profiting from an unauthorised copy made of a copyrighted work. If google are allowed to do it, why can't I? I only want to make one copy of each book from the library. I don't intended to sell that unauthorised copy to anyone, heck I don't even intend to let anyone else see even snippets of it. What's the difference? Why are Google allowed to make copies for their own purposes but I am not? Is it because they are a rich company who can afford lawyers to override copyright laws?
Personally, I believe copyright terms are far too long, but if you're going to have them then you should respect them in all cases. It can't be one law for the rich and one law for everyone else. If the term of copyright is too long and causes all these problems with orphaned works, or works being lost to the public domain because there are no copies left when the copyright term expires, then the problem is with the copyright term and we shouldn't allow exceptions for rich companies to circumvent the problems with the law.
That's why it was revolutionary!