A long-running face-off between the US Authors Guild and Google over the search engine’s scanning of millions of books was brought to an end yesterday when the US Supreme Court denied the writers the right to appeal.
Backed by authors including Nobel laureate JM Coetzee and the Booker winners Richard Flanagan and Margaret Atwood, the Authors Guild appealed to the Supreme Court in February over the ruling that Google’s scanning of millions of books constituted “fair use”, and that “Google Books provide significant public benefits”. Once scanned, the books, both in and out of copyright, are included in Google Books, which enables users to read extracts from books and search their texts.
The copyright infringement case was originally filed in 2005, when the Authors Guild said that “Google’s taking was a plain and brazen violation of copyright law”. Authors have argued that fair use should not “permit a wealthy for-profit entity to digitise millions of works and to cut off authors’ licensing of their reproduction, distribution, and public display rights”.
In October last year, an Authors Guild appeal against the 2013 ruling that Google’s scanning was fair use was rejected by the US court of appeals for the second circuit. The Supreme Court’s rejection of the authors’ appeal now brings the case to a close.
Authors Guild president Roxana Robinson called the decision a “colossal loss” for authors, underlining the Guild’s continued belief that “authors should be compensated when their work is copied for commercial purposes”.
“The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture,” said executive director Mary Rasenberger. “Authors are already among the most poorly paid workers in America; if tomorrow’s authors cannot make a living from their work, only the independently wealthy or the subsidised will be able to pursue a career in writing, and America’s intellectual and artistic soul will be impoverished.”
The organisation said it would “continue to monitor Google and its library partners”, and that it would “take appropriate action to ensure that fair use isn’t abused”.
A spokesperson for Google told the BBC: “We are grateful that the court has agreed to uphold the decision of the Second Circuit which concluded that Google Books is transformative and consistent with copyright law.”
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