M+E Daily
Google Wins One Too Late In Book-Scanning Case
Story Highlights
Seven years after it started, Google last week finally settled the copyright infringement lawsuit brought against it by the Association of American Publishers over Google Books, the search giant’s ambitious program to digitize the world’s printed books. It might wish it had waited another week.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Harold Baer dismissed a separate but related lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and other authors’ groups against four university libraries for digitizing their collections and placing them in the HathiTrust Digital Library. Although Google was not a named defendant in that case, it was doing the digitizing under a deal it struck with the universities in 2005 — the same deal that in part triggered the publishers’ litigation against it.
According to Judge Baer, the law in that case was almost entirely on the universities’ side, particularly the fair use doctrine. “Although I recognize that the facts here may on some levels be without precedent, I am convinced that they fall safely within the protection of fair use such that there is no genuine issue of material fact,” Baer wrote in a 23-page opinion. “I cannot imagine a definition of fair use that would not encompass the transformative uses made by defendants.”
Google had raised a fair-use defense in the case brought against it by the publishers. But in settling the case without a trial, it left that question hanging. The details of agreement have not been released, but in a statement jointly issued by the parties after the settlement, it sounded very much as if Google had conceded that there was indeed a “genuine issue of material fact” as to whether its scanning project qualified as fair use.
“The settlement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright-holders,” the statement read. “U.S. publishers can choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitized by Google for its Library Project.”
One week later, Judge Baer said otherwise.
D’oh!
