[nfbmi-talk] Fw: tremendous fair use victory!

[joe harcz Comcast]

This is going to be great for people who are blind too as it will open up a tremendous digital library with digital resources for all.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: joe harcz Comcast 
To: blind democracy List 
Sent: Friday, November 15, 2013 11:42 AM
Subject: tremendous fair use victory!


 

- Timothy B. Lee. With court win, Google to begin a new chapter After nearly a decade, the courts have finally handed down a ruling on Google's audacious

project to scan millions of books to build a book search engine. The ruling is a decisive victory for Google, for copyright's "fair use" doctrine and for

online innovation. When Google started work on its book search engine a decade ago, the company realized that getting the approval of copyright holders

would be a logistical nightmare. Not only would major publishers probably demand high fees for permission to scan their books, but it would be difficult

to figure out who the appropriate copyright holder was for many older works. So Google took a gamble, scanning library books without seeking copyright

holders' permission and relying on the fair-use principle as a justification. The gamble paid off Thursday as Judge Denny Chin handed Google a big victory.

Chin, who is now a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit but was ruling for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New

York, praised the Google Books project for its many public benefits. He concluded that the project's transformative use of copyrighted books meant that

the use of the books was legal under copyright's fair-use doctrine. Google was a natural pioneer in this case, because its search engine for the Web is

based on a similar legal theory. Google's Web search engine depends on the fair-use doctrine, and Google believed the same legal principle would apply

to the print world. Not all authors agreed. In 2005, a coalition of writers and publishers launched a legal battle that has now stretched out to eight

years. In 2011, the publishers settled with Google. But the authors pressed on, and the court finally reached the legal merits of the case this week. Fair-use

rulings focus on four factors. Of these, the most important is whether the use of the work is "transformative. Chin ruled that Google Books passes this

test easily. "Google Books digitizes books and transforms expressive text into a comprehensive word index that helps readers, scholars, researchers, and

others find books," he wrote. "Google Books does not supersede or supplant books because it is not a tool to be used to read books. Another factor weighing

in Google's favor, in Chin's view, is that Google Books expands the market for books by helping consumers discover works they would not otherwise have

known existed. He rejected the authors' arguments that people could use the search engine to assemble copies of entire books out of the short "snippets"

that Google displays in search results. Chin noted that this was impossible because Google, anticipating this objection, deliberately excludes about 10

percent of the text in each book from being displayed in search results. If the ruling is upheld on appeal, it will represent a significant triumph for

Google. More important, it would expand fair-use rights, benefiting many other technology companies. Many innovative media technologies involve aggregating

or indexing copyrighted content. Today's ruling is the clearest statement yet that such projects fall on the right side of the fair-use line. - Timothy

B. Lee 

 



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