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Google Books Can Proceed As Supreme Court Rejects Authors Guild Appeal (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a challenge to Google's online book library -- Google Books -- from authors who complained that the project makes it harder for them to market their work. The Authors Guild and other writers had claimed that Google's scanning of their books should be deemed as copyright infringement and not fair use. The Supreme Court let stand the lower court opinion that rejected the writers' claims. The decision today means Google Books won't have to close up shop or ask publishers for permission to scan.The ruling, Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the authors group, said, "misunderstood the importance of emerging online markets for books and book excerpts. It failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision. The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
The rent-seeking was built into the Constitution by design.
In this case, merely offering up the relevant passage someone searched for did not violate copyright law, as it was akin to a catalog. They wanted a cut of Google's deep pockets just for searching their books. The court declined to entertain this.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
They don't want to hear it because it interferes with their narrative that Google owes them money. For.. reasons.
For people born before 1990, there was this thing called "research" which took more than 5 seconds to do, thus its need to be described as an actual activity.
The high time cost of "research" before everything was electronic meant that research was often lower quality. (By research, I mean "looking up sources" -- not "doing science" in general.) I'm a physicist, and it's very interesting to look back at old papers (which I do often because it's easy thanks to the internet). Old papers tended to cite few other papers, probably because looking up references was time consuming, and there are only so many hours in a day. E.g. the paper I'm working on cites over 100 other works. Many older papers don't even cite 20 other works.
For example, I was interested in a specific topic (a finite-difference time-domain solution to the Schroedinger equation), so I started digging. It turns out that the technique was "introduced" no less than four times -- basically once a decade since the 1950s. Each paper which "introduced" the technique did not cite previous work on the technique. That's both a dick move and a waste of time and effort. People should have been refining the technique instead of wasting time by rediscovering it. You also see this in even older work. E.g. the "Fokker–Planck equation" is also known as the "Kolmogorov forward equation" because Kolmogorov didn't know that the equation had already been developed.
I wouldn't have been able to learn about the history of the technique if not for electronic records. This research still doesn't take 5 seconds to do. I spend days doing it and discover much more than anyone in 1990 could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
The Campbell court held that hip-hop group 2 Live Crew's parody of the song "Oh, Pretty Woman" was fair use, even though the parody was sold for profit. Thus, having a commercial purpose does not preclude a use from being found fair, even though it makes it less likely.
The transformative nature of computer based analytical processes such as text mining, web mining and data mining has led many to form the view that such uses would be protected under fair use. This view was substantiated by the rulings of Judge Denny Chin in Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc., a case involving mass digitisation of millions of books from research library collections. As part of the ruling that found the book digitisation project was fair use, the judge stated "Google Books is also transformative in the sense that it has transformed book text into data for purposes of substantive research, including data mining and text mining in new areas".
Maybe you don't think anything commercial *should* fall under fair use. But currently the courts disagree and commercial things can be covered by fair use.