Google Defeats Author Rights Organization

The US Supreme Court has ruled against Authors Guild and Google scores a major victory

On April 18, 2016, The Supreme Court of the United States announced it refused to hear about Authors Guild v Google, a pivotal legal case that fought the rights of book authors against the intent of the technology company to establish a huge digital library.

To do so, the American court quietly took the side of the organization, agreeing with earlier judgments that’s huge book scanning venture is lawful. A decade ago, an advocacy organization for rights of authors the Authors Guild, sued the US search engine developer for its book-scanning venture, then known as the Google Books Library Project.

The digital company had scanned 20 million books and launched them across the internet without being permitted by their writers, with the objective to make books more searchable.

At that time, the company also ran advertisements on the scanned pages (since then they have stopped); the guild claimed that the organization was infringing on copyright of writers and as well as depriving them of possible income.

Though the search organization has suspended its advertisements, the legal case continued, dramatically changing from a battle regarding financial compensation to one regarding the treatment of creative work in era of massive digitization.  

A decade later in 2015, a court of appeals gave a ruling again against the writers, stating the book scanning venture was safeguarded under “fair use”—by digitizing, Google Books had changed the books, and therefore wasn’t breach of copyright.

Present US law shields works based on pre-existing works, if they add anything or turn an original into a new one. But an amicus brief in Feb 2016 by big-name authors such as Malcolm Gladwell, J.M. Coetzee and Margaret Atwood claimed that “the internet was not anticipated” when fair usage was described in 1976.

In today’s era, derivative works, no matter how much transformative they are, might spread to millions instantly, all while heavily trading on the creative ideas of anyone without compensation.

The copyright legislation of the US has not been significantly updated since late 1970s, the writers indicated, and the “fair use” doctrine must be transformed in a lightening-speed distribution and digitization. By not listening to the legal case, the court implicitly upholds the venture of Google to provide free access to details that is unusually protected and locked up.

But it also cuts down its probability to redefine the importance of intellectual property in the digital era. BBC has reported that the search company could have lost billions of dollars in terms of damages claims from writers if it had been defeated in the case.

The Authors Guild said it was “disappointed” that the court won’t listen to its appeal.