Authors Guild v. Google, Inc.
804 F.3d 202 (2016)
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Rule of Law:
Creating a comprehensive, searchable digital database of copyrighted books and displaying short snippets of text in response to user searches constitutes a transformative fair use, as it serves a new purpose of providing information about the works without offering a market substitute for the originals.
Facts:
- Authors Jim Bouton, Betty Miles, and Joseph Goulden held copyrights for their respective published books.
- Beginning in 2004, Google Inc. initiated its 'Library Project' by entering into agreements with major research libraries.
- Under these agreements, Google digitally scanned over 20 million books from the libraries' collections, including the authors' copyrighted works, without seeking permission from the rights holders.
- Google created a publicly accessible search engine, 'Google Books,' which allows users to search for words or phrases across the entire corpus of scanned books.
- The search results display a list of books containing the term and allow users to view small portions of text ('snippets') around the searched term to see it in context.
- Google implemented restrictions on snippet viewing, such as limiting the number of snippets shown per search, preventing the viewing of adjacent snippets, and 'blacklisting' (making unavailable) a certain percentage of each book's pages.
- The program also allowed participating libraries to download and retain a digital copy of each book they had submitted for scanning, under agreements requiring them to abide by copyright law.
Procedural Posture:
- The Authors Guild and several individual authors (Plaintiffs) filed a class-action lawsuit against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging copyright infringement.
- The parties reached a proposed settlement, but in 2011, the district court rejected it as unfair to absent class members.
- The district court later certified a plaintiff class, a decision Google appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
- The Second Circuit vacated the class certification, directing the district court to first rule on the merits of Google's fair use defense.
- On remand, Google moved for summary judgment, and the Plaintiffs cross-moved for summary judgment.
- The district court granted summary judgment for Google, holding that the Google Books project constituted a fair use.
- The Authors Guild et al. (Plaintiffs-Appellants) appealed the district court's summary judgment ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
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Issue:
Does Google's unauthorized digitization of entire copyrighted books to create a public search function and display snippets of text constitute copyright infringement, or is it protected as a fair use under the Copyright Act?
Opinions:
Majority - Leval, J.
No. Google's creation of a searchable digital database and the display of snippets are transformative uses that do not constitute copyright infringement. The court analyzed the four factors of fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107. First, the 'purpose and character of the use' is highly transformative because the project's goal is not to supersede the original books but to provide information about them, creating a new and valuable research tool. Second, the 'nature of the copyrighted work' was not a dispositive factor. Third, while Google copied the entirety of the works, this was necessary to achieve its transformative purpose, and the amount of text revealed to the public through snippets is not a substantial or effective substitute for the original. Fourth, the 'effect on the potential market' is minimal, as the snippet function does not offer a competing substitute that would harm the market for the original books or their derivatives. The court also rejected the authors' claims that Google usurped their derivative rights, created an undue risk of hacking, or was liable for distributing digital copies to libraries for their own non-infringing uses.
Analysis:
This landmark decision significantly expands the doctrine of 'transformative use' within fair use jurisprudence, particularly for large-scale digital projects. It establishes that mass digitization for the purpose of creating an information-location tool is a protected fair use, even when conducted by a commercial entity and involving the copying of entire works. The ruling provides crucial legal support for search engines, data-mining operations, and other technologies that use copyrighted content to generate new forms of information and analysis, so long as the final product does not serve as a market substitute for the original work.
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