Google Books Copyright Suit Ends As Supreme Court Rejects Challenge
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a case focused on whether Alphabet ( GOOGL ) unit Google carried out copyright infringement when it scanned millions of books and made them searchable online for free, dealing a final blow to a group of book authors who had first sued the search giant more than a decade ago. In a brief written order, the justices said they won’t take up an appeal by the Authors Guild and individual writers who argued Google engaged in copyright infringement “on an epic scale,” the Wall Street Journal said on Monday. Lower courts had sided with the company, ruling that the search giant engaged in “fair use” of the writers’ works for its Google Books digital database, which allows individuals to search for specified terms in more than 20 million works and view excerpts of many of the books that appear in the search results. In the most recent court decision, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York last October ruled Google’s actions were legal. Because the Supreme Court declined a review, those rulings are the final word in the matter, and it’s the end of the road for the authors’ legal push. The authors in their court petition argued that the lower-court decisions represented “an unprecedented judicial expansion” of the concept of fair use and threatened copyright protections in the digital age. They said Google copied the books for profit and shouldn’t be excused “based upon the perceived social benefit” of its search product. Google said its books database gives readers a new way to find books and advances the interests of authors. “We’re pleased the court has confirmed that the project is fair use, acting like a card catalog for the digital age,” Google said in a statement to IBD in October, when the circuit court in New York rejected the infringement claims against Google, initially filed in 2005. The three-judge panel had affirmed a 2013 District Court judgment that the online-search service does not violate intellectual property law because it provides “several important educational purposes.” Google had said it could face billions of dollars in potential damages if the authors prevailed. The Authors Guild had said that Google makes 78% of the books, including those under copyright, available for display to its users for free, through the use of “snippets” — short bits — of the books online. The Guild had asked for “fair compensation for Google’s commercial use of their books and for Google’s distribution of their e-books to libraries.” The Google Books project began in 2004, when some of the world’s leading research libraries started to allow Google to scan books in their collections. The company gave the libraries digital copies of the books it scanned. Many of the books in the Google database are out of print. A sizable number of them are in the public domain, no longer eligible for copyright protection. But millions of other books are under copyright protection, and Google didn’t seek permission from the copyright holders for its scanning activity. The individual plaintiffs who filed the proposed class action against Google included, among others, former New York Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton, the author of the acclaimed memoir, “Ball Four.” Alphabet stock was up a fraction in midday trading in the stock market today , near 787.