Last month, in Authors Guild v. Google,1 the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, on cross-motions for summary judgment, upheld Google’s fair use defense and accordingly dismissed infringement claims by the Authors Guild. The guild had asserted that (i) Google’s mass digitization of the collections of several large university libraries, (ii) its delivery of digitized versions of these collections to the libraries, and (iii) its display of “snippets” from the books in response to search requests, violated the authors’ exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution and public display under §106(1), (3) and (5) of the Copyright Act.2 In finding fair use, Judge Denny Chin, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (here sitting as a district judge),3 emphasized the public benefits derived from the Google Books project, and the lack of harm to authors.
The Google Books Project
Google Books consists of two parts: the Partner Program and the Library Project. In the Partner Program, the rights holders, primarily publishers, grant Google the right to scan their books and to control the extent to which the text may be displayed. The Partner Program is not at issue in Google. The Library Project is based on a huge digital compilation made by Google’s scanning the collections of the libraries of the University of Michigan, Cornell University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University (collectively, the libraries). To date, more than 20 million books have been scanned by Google, and digital copies of the scans have been provided to each library with respect to its own collection.
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