On October 16, 2015, the Second Circuit affirmed the district court's ruling in Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc., 954 F. Supp. 2d 282 (S.D.N.Y. 2013), previously reported here, that Google's digitization of complete copyrighted works, without author permission, and the creation of excerpt "snippets," accessible to the public by contracting libraries for research, is a transformative fair use.
More than 10 years ago, Google embarked on its Library Project in cooperation with major international research libraries to digitize more than 2 million works in order to provide enhanced scholarly research capabilities. Although some of the works were in the public domain, many were still under copyright, and including orphan works. Plaintiff copyright holders, including individual author class representatives, brought a class action suit asserting that this unauthorized use of their works constituted direct and contributory copyright infringement. Google defended the Library Project (available to the public as the "Google Books" search engine) as a transformative fair use.
A U.S. copyright owner's enumerated rights under the Copyright Act to use and control its work are limited by the doctrine of "fair use," which permits what would otherwise constitute an infringing use, if the use is made for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, or scholarship and research. 17 U.S.C. § 107. Fair use is considered necessary to fulfill the mandate of copyright law to "promote the Progress of...
