14 DAY TRIAL // About a decade ago, Google embarked on one of its most ambitious projects at the time with the goal of digitizing all of the world's books and make them available, for search at least, to anyone on the planet.
That seems like a lofty goal and something no one could have anything against. Well, that's until you account for copyright law which, these days, only manages to make it harder for people to access information and enjoy art, despite those being the primary goals of the law.
Google was sued in 2005 over the book scanning by groups of publishers and authors. The two sides reached an agreement a few years later in which the company would pay a significant amount of money to the two groups for the right to scan any book it wanted, in the US at least.
But the court didn't like the agreement, since it unfairly favored Google. With a revised settlement rejected, the lawsuit is now underway again.
Google is trying to make a case for itself by explaining that its process, i.e. scanning books but only making them available for search, not full reading, is "transformative" enough to be labeled as fair use and thus exempt from copyright law.
The company is now arguing over the fair use issue after it won an appeal that dismissed the "class action" status of the lawsuit.
Google is arguing that Amazon also provides search within the books it sells and that entire pages are available to shoppers without affecting sales. Ironically, the Authors Guild is arguing that Google introducing the same feature would mean less Amazon sales.
Despite the many steps and drawbacks, the lawsuit is finally reaching a point where it gets interesting. The entire matter, after all, centers around fair use and it's a shame that it took eight years for the meat of the problem to finally be discussed. Of course, there's no way of knowing what the court decides. It could go either way for Google, but at least the matter will be decided once and for all.