Google Book Copying Seen As Legal

Despite objections from publishers and writers, copyright law appears to be on Google's side, legal experts say. The social value of Google's initiative to digitize library books, including those protected by copyright, will likely weigh heavily in the search engine's favor.


Regardless, there is a clear legal precedent for any potential court battle between publishers and Google, and it favors the Mountain View, Calif., company. In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., a 2003 case in which a photographer sued a search engine, claiming copyright infringement for displaying thumbnail images of work originally posted on his site, the Ninth Circuit found in favor of the search engine: the act of copying the material, even though it was for commercial purposes, was not exploitative and therefore was fair use.

In American Geophysical Union vs. Texaco Inc., the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found in 1994 that a private company did not have the right to photocopy entire works and hand them out to its research staff. But in Williams & Wilkins Co. vs. The United States Records, an equally divided Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s decision that it was fair use for a library to photocopy research journals and distribute them. “Google lies somewhere in between those two cases,” Donahue says.

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