[Irtalk] Google Gets Total Victory Over Authors Guild: Book Scanning Is Fair Use | Techdirt

[Hilton Gibson]

This one has been a long time coming, but this morning, Judge Denny Chin
(who actually has a long history of siding with copyright holders) found
that Google's book scanning project is fair use. This is a huge victory in
a variety of ways. Five years ago, we thought that Google made a huge
mistake in dropping its fair use fight here, in trying to work out a
"settlement," which would have harmed fair use by suggesting these kinds of
things needed to be licensed, while also setting up a near de facto
monopoly on digitizing books. Thankfully, that settlement got rejected, and
the fair use argument went back into the courts. Actually, Judge Chin first
focused on whether or not this should be allowed as a class action, but in
a somewhat surprising move, the appeals court basically ignored that issue
entirely and told Judge Chin to answer the fair use question first.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131114/09561525242/google-gets-total-victory-over-authors-guild-book-scanning-is-fair-use.shtml
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