In yet another unfortunate turn of events in the Authors Guild’s fight to enforce their interpretation of copyright law, the United States District Court in Manhattan ruled in favor of Google in Authors Guild v. Google, Inc. The court held that by digitizing books and provided only snippets, Google’s use of the material was transformative and not harmful to the market for the original work, this making it a fair use under the Copyright Act. Judge Denny Chin’s view is that such a service will draw in new readers who were previously unaware of the books and thereby boost sales. That is certainly a possibility, but it seems equally likely that Google’s rather generous snippets will allow users to immediately find what they are searching for and never bother with procuring the entire work, thus preventing a purchase.
The fair use factors are highly fact specific and predicting the outcome of fair use cases is often difficult. But some say that this is not a problem here because of another recently decided case in the Second Circuit, Authors Guild, Inc v. HathiTrust. In this case the Authors Guild sued a consortium of academic institutions for partnering with Google to make digitized works available to their educational communities. Judge Chin referenced HathiTrust in the Google decision and said that “if there is no liability for copyright infringement on the libraries’ part, there can be no liability on Google’s part.”
While the decision in HathiTrust is certainly persuasive, it is not necessarily controlling. That case held that the HathiTrust’s use of books scanned by Google for educational purposes was a fair use under the Copyright Act, a statute with multiple provisions that allow educational institutions such as libraries and universities to do certain things that would otherwise be infringement. Google, on the other hand, is amassing a gigantic collection of text and making certain portions almost indiscriminately available. It is naïve to think that Google’s motivations are perfectly aligned with the academic institutions that make up the HathiTrust.
Google is emphatically not a library, university, or other institution devoted to education or serving the public—it is a business. And it’s a business that has been aggressively expanding of late. Like libraries, Google is a place to find information. But unlike libraries, Google does not provide information solely as a way to benefit the community or further education. Instead, Google has very successfully monetized information gathering and storage. Not only do searchers on Google.com view advertisements above and alongside their search results, many Gmail users now see advertisements formatted to look like emails when they open their inbox.
Then, perhaps the most persuasive part of the HathiTrust case was the decision not to enjoin the Orphan Works Project, an attempt to make works of unclear authorship available to the public. Judge Baer, in holding that the issue lacked ripeness, said “[w]ere I to enjoin the OWP, I would do so in the absence of crucial information about what that program will look like should it come to pass and whom it will impact.” Judge Chin may not have considered Google’s penchant for monetizing the previously “un-monetizable,” but it certainly could yet happen.
For another look at this landmark decision, see http://test.mttlr.com/2013/11/24/judge-has-ruled-in-landmark-copyright-case-google-books-is-here-to-stay/.