Authors Guild v. Google

United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit · 2015 · Property

PropertyCopyrightFair Usefair usetransformative purposesearch functionsnippet viewdigitization

Facts

Google, without permission from rights holders, scanned tens of millions of books submitted by major libraries, including plaintiffs' copyrighted books, created machine-readable text and an index, and stored the digital files on secure servers. Google made a public search tool that lets users search for terms across the database and see limited snippet views showing tiny segments of text containing the searched terms. Google imposed restrictions on snippet access, including blacklisting one snippet per page and one full page out of every ten, limiting results to three snippets per search term, and disabling snippets for certain categories of books. Under agreements requiring lawful use and anti-dissemination precautions, Google also allowed participating libraries to download digital copies of books they had submitted.

Issue

Whether Google's unauthorized digitization of entire copyrighted books, use of those copies to provide a public search function and limited snippet view, and provision of digital copies to participating libraries constitute fair use or otherwise infringe plaintiffs' copyrights and derivative rights. The case also asked whether Google's commercial motivation, security risks, and the libraries' possession of digital copies defeat fair use or make Google liable.

Rule

A use is favored as fair use when it is highly transformative, meaning it communicates something new and different from the original or expands the original's utility, and when the copying is reasonably necessary to that purpose without providing a meaningful substitute for the original or its plausible derivatives. Complete copying can be fair use when full copying is necessary to achieve the transformative purpose and the public-facing output is sufficiently limited so that it does not cause significant market substitution. An author's derivative-work right does not include an exclusive right to provide information about the author's work, and speculative risks of hacking or third-party misuse do not establish infringement or contributory infringement on this record.

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One of 10 multiple-choice questions for this case. Pick an answer to see why.

In Seattle, North Coast Archive scanned thousands of copyrighted history books without permission and converted them into machine-readable text. Its public website lets users search a word across the database and learn only which books contain the word and how many times it appears, but displays no text from the books.

The copyright owners sue for infringement. What is the strongest argument that the archive's use is fair use?

Explanation. The majority held that creating a full-text searchable database is a quintessentially transformative use when it serves a different function from the original books. It also held that complete copying can be fair when full copying is reasonably necessary to achieve that transformative purpose and the public-facing output does not provide a meaningful substitute for the originals.