Earlier this month, the District Court for the Southern District of New York, on remand from the 2nd Circuit, sided with Google in the copyright infringement proceedings that began in 2005 over the Google Books Library Project. Judge Chin, presiding over the case, agreed that Google Books provided “significant public benefit”, and accepted Google’s fair use defense for the scanning of more than 20 million books for an electronic database, and making snippets of the text available for online searches.
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Fair Use Defense Has Wings for Ravens, NFL
A federal court affirmed Tuesday that use of the “Flying B” logo by the Baltimore Ravens and the NFL was fair use.
Google’s Book-Scanning Deemed Fair Use By Second Circuit
Google has won a major victory in its ten-year legal fight with authors over its Google Library Project, which digitizes and indexes millions of copyrighted books for an online library without consent from the copyright owner. Since 2004, as part of the Google Library Project, Google has scanned, rendered machine-readable, and indexed more than 20 million books, which includes both public domain and copyrighted works, for its Google Books search engine. The search engine allows users to search words or terms that yields a list of all books in the database in which those words or terms appear, as well as the number of times the word or term appears in each book. The search also provides a brief description of each book which gives some basic additional information, such as a list of the words and terms that appear with most frequency in the book. Users are also allowed a limited viewing of the text of the book to see “snippets” of text containing the searched-for terms. The search sometimes provides links to buy the book online and identifies libraries where the book can be located.