Judge: Google Books also falls under fair use on appeal in the US

Google Books, the service in which Google scans physical books to make them searchable and partly transparent, is legal according to the American court. That ruling was already made in 2013, but the American Authors Guild appealed.

In the first lawsuit, the judge already ruled that Google Books is ‘transformative’. That is, the way Google uses and presents the copyrighted books falls within the criteria for fair use. The judges deem the potential lost revenue of rightholders in this case too small to see Google Books as a replacement for the function of the books themselves. Google can therefore continue to scan books and does not have to request prior permission from publishers to include the works in Google Books.

The judges see Google Books more as an addition to the books. The program makes it possible to search books for how often a specific word occurs or not. Such a search function is particularly interesting for linguists. In addition, Google does not display advertisements at Books and the company does not earn anything from the referrals to the points of sale of the books.

The previous lawsuit against Google and its Books program was filed in 2005 and came to a conclusion in 2013. The authors felt that Google should have requested permission to scan the more than 20 million books. They demanded $750 in damages for each book scanned; Google estimated that a verdict against the project could have cost the company $3 billion.

The Authors Guild is disappointed with the conclusion of the second episode of the long-running legal battle against Google. The interest group of American writers therefore says it wants to submit the case again, this time to the American Supreme Court. That is the highest court in the United States.