On November 14, 2013, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the plaintiff's copyright suit in The Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. The decision was based on the Court's determination that Google engaged in "fair use" of the plaintiffs' copyrighted materials when it scanned over 20 million books and made portions of them available online. Essential to the Court's decision – and many "fair use" copyright cases – was the Court's analysis of the nature of Google's use of the plaintiffs' copyrighted books, which the Court held to be "transformative."
Google's use of the plaintiffs' copyrighted books was held to be "transformative" and, therefore weighed towards a finding of fair use (i.e., no copyright infringement) because book digitization: (1) created a "comprehensive word index" that helped readers and researchers locate books and (2) made it possible to analyze the words within the books as "data for purposes of substantive research, including data mining and text mining." If the decision is upheld after the expected appeal, future decisions will determine if the Court's "transformative use" analysis is limited to undertakings akin to Google Books or whether it will be applied to all digitization of content. If broadly followed, the Court's decision that making content digital and searchable satisfies this significant factor in a copyright fair use analysis will likely have wide-ranging effects on the content industry, as well as the use of third party content online.
For further information visit Waller TIPS blog
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
