Appeals court rules in favor of Google Books

in legal on 2015-10-20 05:20 (#R0W2)

A federal appeals court ruled Friday in a decadelong dispute that Google digitization of over 20 million books, mostly out-of-print titles, did not violate copyrights because the company only showed short sections of the books in its database, so it would be difficult for anyone to read any of the works in their entirety by repeatedly entering different search requests. "This does not threaten the rights holders with any significant harm to the value of their copyrights or diminish their harvest of copyright revenue."

The Authors Guild and various authors had challenged Google in 2005, contending that the digital book project violated their rights. The appeals court said Google's profit motivation does not justify denial of what is a fair use of the books' content and overall enhances public knowledge.

The appeals panel said it recognized that libraries that had negotiated with Google to receive digital copies from the company might use them in an infringing manner. It said that could expose the libraries and Google to liability but called it "sheer speculation" to raise the issue now.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28979320/appeals-court-rules-favor-googles-online-library

Stupid offline judges (Score: 2, Insightful)

by tanuki64@pipedot.org on 2015-10-20 20:21 (#R3FR)

...so it would be difficult for anyone to read any of the works in their entirety by repeatedly entering different search requests.

Ok.... I say 'stupid' with a very bad conscience. The ruling shows a remarkable common sense. But difficult? I suppose it never occured to them that people could write a script, which does this automatically. And then automatically stitches the pieces together. Unless of course, if there are certain pages, which regardless of search terms are never shown.

Re: Stupid offline judges (Score: 1)

by wootery@pipedot.org on 2015-10-22 15:43 (#R9X0)

And just what does any of that have to do with copyright law?

Re: Stupid offline judges (Score: 1)

by tanuki64@pipedot.org on 2015-10-22 16:57 (#RA4C)

The judge argued that it is too difficult to exploit to get the full content of a book, so it does not do any significant harm to the copyright holders. This need not to be true, if no pages are exempt from appearing as search result. The judge might overestimate the difficulty for a specialized program to repeatedly request parts of a book with different search terms and automatically stitch the pieces together.