New York Times

Supreme Court Declines to Hear Authors Guild Challenge to Google Books

April 19, 2016

by Adam Liptak

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday refused to revive a challenge to Google’s digital library of millions of books, turning down an appeal from authors who said the project amounted to copyright infringement on a mass scale.

The Supreme Court’s brief order left in place an appeals court decisionthat the project was a “fair use” of the authors’ work, ending a legal saga that had lasted more than a decade.

In 2004, Google started building a vast digital library, scanning and digitizing more than 20 million books from the collections of major research libraries. Readers can search the resulting database, Google Books, for keywords or phrases and read some snippets of text.

The Authors Guild and several writers sued Google in 2005, saying the digital library was a commercial venture that drove down sales of their work. In their petition seeking Supreme Court review, they said “this case represents an unprecedented judicial expansion of the fair-use doctrine that threatens copyright protection in the digital age.”

The petition to the Supreme Court also included a brief signed by a group of prominent authors, including the playwright Tony Kushner, the historian Taylor Branch and the novelists Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey and Ursula K. Le Guin.

“Fair use is not easy and never has been,” the brief stated. “The unprecedented scale of the Google Library Book Project, by itself, warrants a reconsideration of fair use in this case.”

In a statement released on Monday, the Authors Guild said that the Supreme Court’s decision to not hear the case would leave writers vulnerable to copyright infringement. It also suggested the case would have broader impact beyond the book industry.

“The denial of review is further proof that we’re witnessing a vast redistribution of wealth from the creative sector to the tech sector, not only with books, but across the spectrum of the arts,” the guild’s president, the novelist Roxana Robinson, said in the statement.

In its own Supreme Court brief, Google said both readers and writers were better off thanks to its efforts. “Google Books gives readers a dramatically new way to find books of interest,” the brief said. “By formulating their own text queries and reviewing search results, users can identify, determine the relevance of and locate books they might otherwise never have found.”

On Monday, Google said in a statement, “We are grateful that the court has agreed to uphold the decision of the Second Circuit which concluded that Google Books is transformative and consistent with copyright law.’’

As is their custom, the justices gave no reasons for declining to hear the case, Authors Guild v. Google Inc., No. 15-849.

Last year, a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said that Google’s project was lawful and beneficial.

“The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals,” Judge Pierre N. Leval, an authority on copyright law, wrote for the panel.