Internet search services provider Google Inc., US, has submitted court filings stating that its massive book scanning project is fair use because it has delivered many public benefits without harming authors. The company has been fighting a court battle with the Authors Guild on the project, Google Books. It claims that its creation of full-text book searching is "the most significant advance in library search technology in the last five decades" and that the Authors Guild has shown "no evidence that Google Books has displaced the sale of even a single book."
The new filing is in response to Judge Denny Chin's deadline for Google and the Authors Guild to submit arguments on why the case can be decided without a trial. This is just the latest phase of a legal dispute that began in 2005 after authors and publishers sued Google over its ambitious plan to create a massive digital library.
The lawsuit was on ice for several years as the parties worked out a settlement that would have created an online market for the books. Judge Chin blew up the settlement in March 2011, however, after concluding that it was a "bridge too far."
In its filing, Google cites a number of pop culture examples to argue that a searchable digital library is a benefit to the public. The company also describes how book searches unearthed references to an unheralded baseball player, Steve Hovley, that would otherwise have remained buried. Google also cites the more serious example of Minoru Yasui, a civil rights lawyer who is all but invisible in the Library of Congress catalogue but surfaces repeatedly in Google Books. Additionally, Google cites evidence suggesting that online book discovery helps authors sell more copies.
The Authors Guild, which is expected to submit its own motion for summary judgment later, has repeatedly argued that Google had no right to take copyright law into its own hands and reproduce authors' works without permission. The Guild is also at the center of a related fair-use case with libraries over the "Hathi Trust," a massive digital replication of their paper collections.
