Google won an 8-year lawsuit: now the Google Books project is free from the claims of the Authors Guild

This Tuesday, New York District Judge Denny Chin ruled a long lawsuit that lasted almost 8 years, from the Authors Guild to Google and its Google Books scanning project.

The essence of the Guild's claim was that the transfer of paper books into electronic copies is illegal in terms of copyright infringement, as well as a possible monopoly of Google search in this area. At one time, the Guild attorneys calculated the financial losses of the authors and demanded for each illegally scanned book $ 750 that the search giant had to pay. Thus, given that the claims related to approximately four million books from a general catalog of about 20 million publications, the total amount of compensation went off-scale for three billion.

As a result, the judge wrote his conclusion , from which it follows that for the Google Books project the doctrine of fair use , according to which "... free use of copyrighted materials is allowed, subject to certain conditions." At the same time, Judge Chin believes that the availability of digital copies of books does not affect the original market for sales of paper books, because Google does not sell digital copies of books and does not provide access to their full version. Thus, readers can familiarize themselves with the book in a convenient way, which provides the authors with an income. In addition, the availability of books on the Internet actually means their accessibility for people with disabilities, and also contributes to the preservation of old publications from destruction and loss of information.
')
Absolutely expected, Google expressed satisfaction with this court decision, but Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, expressed in the sense that such a precedent creates a challenge to the copyright system on the Internet, and the efforts that Google adds to the Google Books catalog are beyond the principle of "fair use".

[ Source ]