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Court rules in favour of Google book-scanning after decade-long dispute

In the US, a federal appeals court has ruled that Google has not violated copyright laws by digitising more than 20 million books, reports CNBC. The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Judge Denny Chin’s November 2013 ruling that as most of the digitised titles were out-of-print and Google only provided ‘snippets’ for readers, this represented a ‘transformative use of the information and thus did not violate copyright laws’. The Authors Guild challenged Google in 2005 on that basis that the project violated authors’ rights and would have an impact on potential sales. The appeals court said: ‘Snippet view, at best and after a large commitment of manpower, produces discontinuous, tiny fragments, amounting in the aggregate to no more than 16% of a book. This does not threaten the rights holders with any significant harm to the value of their copyrights or diminish their harvest of copyright revenue.’

 

Category: International news