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"  Eight years and many millions of digitized pages later, a federal judge has declared that Google Books is legal under U.S. copyright law, throwing out a lawsuit by the Authors Guild, a writers&amp;#039; union, that wanted to recoup potentially billions of dollars of damages from Google. U.S. Circuit Court Judge Denny Chin decided that the search giant did not break the law by digitizing excerpts of 20 millions books and making the full text of those books searchable online. Excerpts is the key word here. If the person who owns the rights to a book gives their blessing to Google Books, then Google would publish the entire text. (PopMech&amp;#039;s archive dating back to 1902, for instance, is freely available to read.) But if Google didn&amp;#039;t have permission, it would publish only parts of the book, so that readers could not read the entire book text online. This is a delicate dance that helped the tech giant to argue that its book digitization is fair use. Basically, Google had to prove two things to win the case. First, that Google Books is transformative\u2014that it adds something new to the original work. Second, Mountain View had to show the judge that the benefits of Google Books are not primarily commercial, and that it isn&amp;#039;t depriving authors of income by posting their books online. The second point was easier for Google to prove than the first. In a passage of the decision highlighted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Judge Chin gushes about the public good of Google Books, calling it an &amp;quot;invaluable research tool that permits students, teachers, librarians, and others to more efficiently identify and locate books.&amp;quot; Because Google posts only excerpts of books, it was easy to make the case that it isn&amp;#039;t taking money out of the hands of authors\u2014in fact, some writers probably have their works rediscovered because Google makes them searchable. Yes, Google rakes in the money from its search engine\u2014a search engine that&amp;#039;s made better by the inclusion of 20 million books\u2014but Chin decided Google Books is not primarily commercial, even if Google&amp;#039;s motivation for creating it is. Searchability leads back to point number one: whether Google Books is transformative. Digitizing books doesn&amp;#039;t add to them in the palpable way you might see from, say, sampling, wherein a musician builds a new song upon the pieces of an older one. But Google Books does add something to the books that wasn&amp;#039;t there before\u2014making the text instantly searchable. The big data benefits of that fact were enough for the judge to recognize Google Books as fair use. With so much money at stake (Google could have been liable for up to $3 billion in damages if it lost), expect the Authors Guild to appeal. In the meantime, expect many more old books to find their way to the cloud. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/a9727/heres-why-a-judge-finally-decided-google-books-is-legal-16161460/>