Fair use and Google Books

In a recent court ruling, Google's 'Google Books' project was ruled fair use of copyrighted material. The core of the case dealt with whether Google had violated copyright law by digitizing huge amounts of copyrighted literature. The Google Books project had been, and now will continue to, scan books and digitize their content using algorithmic text recognition combined with methods such as reCaptcha. Google uses this data to provide a searchable library of books to it's users. Search results provide a list of books related to a search and samples from these books to show how the search terms appear. Google profits from this by directing you to the Play Store page for the books in your results, as well as via their typical advertising channels. The Authors Guild (the organization suing Google) claimed that since Google was profiting because of unauthorized digital copies of the books, they deserved compensation.

In reading about this ruling, it seemed that the whole case revolved about the legal definition of fair use. For something to be legally considered fair use, various factors are considered. The purpose of using a copyrighted work is considered, whether it is commercial or non-profit. The amount of the original work copied is considered. Also considered is effect on the value of the original work.

Google manages to find itself in a grey area in every one of these categories. Clearly google intended to profit from this venture. The database they created provides profit for Google through multiple channels, but at the same time they created a free service that greatly facilitates research and education. Google created and used complete digital copies of the works it scanned, but only released small portions. By linking to the Google Play Store wherever possible, Google probably generated revenue for many authors.

This ruling, and what it means for future rulings, raises some interesting moral questions. It suggests that copyright infringement that has clear negative aspects (monetization, complete reproduction, propagation of copied materials) can be deemed fair use if there are positive aspects as well. Could a teacher torrent a movie to show a single scene in class? Could I get away with pirating every movie in existence, then use image recognition to create some crazy movie recommendation service, then monetize that service? The hypotheticals go on forever. It seems that this case has widened the grey area between obviously illegal copyright infringement and completely valid copyright use. Going forward, I suspect this ruling will be used in many copyright related suits to come.