Earlier this year in a review of Copyright Unbalanced for the Weekly Standard, I noted that one of the things the legislature and the courts need to do in the realm of copyright law is better clarify (and, probably, expand somewhat) what constitutes "fair use."*
One such court ruling came down today, as a U.S. District Court granted summary judgment for Google to continue scanning copyrighted books. Over at Reason, Brian Doherty highlighted the important part of the ruling:
by helping readers and researchers identify books, Google Books benefits authors and publishers. When a user clicks on a search result and is directed to an "About the Book" page, the page will offer links to sellers of the book and/or libraries listing the book as part of their collections.....The About the Book page for Ball Four [whose author is one of the parties suing Google Books], for example,provides links to Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, Books-A-Million, and IndieBound....
A user could simply click on any of these links to be directed to a website where she could purchase the book. Hence, Google Books will generate new audiences and create new sources of income. As amici observe: "Thanks to . . . [Google Books], librarians can identify and efficiently sift through possible research sources, amateur historians have access to a wealth of previously obscure material, and everyday readers and researchers can find books that were once buried in research library archives."
Anecdata makes lousy law, but this more or less comports to my experience using Google Books. For instance, I recently was interested in obtaining a book about cinema under Fascism in Italy. A quick Google Books search provided me with several options and, after checking out a few introductions and reviews of the books elsewhere, I picked up a copy of Steven Ricci's Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943. Google Books essentially brings the book-browsing experience to online shopping, which strikes me as a pretty good thing.
Of course, it can go to far. I don't think anyone would object to there being some sort of limit placed on how much content Google can show—five pages, a chapter, ten keyword searches in a book, something like that. (Indeed, Judge Denny Chin lays out the extensive precautions taken by Google to ensure that someone can't simply search for a whole book in Google Books.) It's entirely understandable that authors would be nervous about having all of their work available to be read for free from any computer hooked up to the Internet. That goes far beyond any reasonable conception of "fair use."
Anyway, as someone who takes a pretty hard line on copyright violations—ask me how much pity I feel for folks who get sued for downloading movies and music illegally sometime**—I think this is a pretty solid ruling, one that will benefit readers and writers alike.
*"Fair use" is the doctrine that allows one to use snippets of a copyrighted work—say, quoting a paragraph in a book—without violating copyright.
**Answer: none at all.