The San Jose Mercury News reports the following . We wonder what it means for legal texts. Seems to us that Google could very quickly capture the market in headnotes with a minimum amount of investment
Here’s the piece….
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24522902/google-wins-big-victory-legal-dispute-over-book
Google (GOOG) won a major legal victory Thursday in its campaign to create electronic copies of millions of books, when a federal judge rejected authors’ copyright complaints and concluded there are significant public benefits to the long-stalled project.
After eight years of legal wrangling, New York federal Judge Denny Chin dismissed a lawsuit by the Authors Guild with a ruling that some scholars believe could open the door for other new approaches to analyzing stockpiles of copyrighted information — since the ruling focused in part on Google’s effort to create a searchable index of all the books that it scans.
File-This Jan. 3, 2013 file photo shows a Google sign at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo)
While the authors’ group announced plans to appeal, experts said the appellate court that will hear the case has made other rulings that are sympathetic to Google’s argument that the book-scanning project should be allowed as a “fair use,” under the terms of U.S. copyright law.
Google has already scanned more than 20 million books under agreements with libraries at several leading universities including Stanford, mostly without negotiating permission from individual copyright holders. Authors and publishers objected that they weren’t compensated or even consulted.
Chin, however, concluded that the scanning is a “fair use” because it adds new value to the books. In a 30-page ruling, the judge said the digital index has already become an “invaluable research tool” for scholars who can use it to analyze large numbers of books for things like word usage patterns or changing trends in literary styles.
The project is also likely to generate new readership, the judge said, by making it easier for readers to find books they didn’t know about, leading to more sales and income for authors and publishers. He added that the digitized versions could be more readily converted to formats used by blind or disabled readers.
Google is not making the full text of scanned copyrighted books available on its own websites, Chin noted. Instead, the company lets web visitors search for keywords and view relevant “snippets,” amounting to an eighth of a page.
While anyone can search repeatedly to obtain multiple snippets, the company has promised to block at least 10 percent of the full text from being viewed. Google also shows links to its own online store and other sites where readers can purchase authorized copies of the full text, either in electronic or printed format.
The project “advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders,” Chin wrote.
Google benefits because the project could draw more people to its online services, Chin acknowledged, but he added that Google isn’t profiting directly because it’s not selling the scanned versions or using them to show ads.
Under its agreement with the libraries, Google provides a complete electronic copy of each book to the library that provided the printed text for scanning. But Chin said the libraries already owned the books and have the right to let their patrons borrow or read them.
Google praised the ruling, although it did not indicate whether it plans to proceed with the project while the case is under appeal.
“As we have long said, Google Books is in compliance with copyright law and acts like a card catalog for the digital age, giving users the ability to find books to buy or borrow,” the company said.
Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken disagreed. “Google made unauthorized digital editions of nearly all of the world’s valuable copyright-protected literature and profits from displaying those works,” he said. “In our view, such mass digitization and exploitation far exceeds the bounds of the fair use defense.”
When Google first announced its plans, nearly a decade ago, the project was viewed as both audacious and alarming to some — especially to authors and publishers who feared losing the rights to their work.
But today, “our culture is becoming more comfortable with algorithms and ambitious projects involving lots of data, and more comfortable with seeing that they can add to human knowledge, rather than take away value,” said James Grimmelmann, a University of Maryland law professor who has followed the case closely.
He said the ruling may encourage other ventures, commercial or nonprofit, that might compile and analyze large sets of copyrighted data from books or other sources.
Some critics have complained that Google could monopolize access to the books in its collection. Chin acknowledged that concern in 2011 when he rejected a private settlement that Google had negotiated with authors and publishers. But legal experts said Chin’s new ruling sets a legal standard that rival companies such as Microsoft could use to pursue their own projects.
