A Massive Project Getting Close to Boundaries

A United States appeals court made a ruling in favor of Google and its book scanning project against authors who sued for copyright violations.

The three-judge appeals panel concurred with the decision of Judge Denny Chin, with both decisions stating that Google is abiding legally by the “fair use” provision in this book-scanning project.

I recall this effort in discussion in Introduction to Library and Information Science LIS 701. I was actually unaware that Google was scanning books but only displaying snippets. That fact doesn’t make Google’s effort seem like that major of a copyright infringement.

Granted, the idea that a company is scanning every book available and then putting its content online in the public domain appears to be an effort to take away authors’ rights to their works. And doing this for every book appears to be such a large-scale effort, more so than just making pieces of one book available, in terms of the fair use provision. Yet posting only snippets online is quite different than making the full text of whole books available. It appears completely legitimate to post snippets in an online library of sorts so that people can view pieces of the content of the book, getting a taste to determine if they want to view the whole book — hinting at some financial motives.

Clearly, as companies like Google undergo efforts to make more materials available digitally for the masses to access their content, they will have to watch themselves as they push up against copyright boundaries.

Ax, J. (2015.) Google book-scanning project legal, says U.S. appeals court. Reuters. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/16/us-google-books-idUSKCN0SA1S020151016