18 November 2013
Today, federal judge Denny Chin rejected a copyright challenge Google's practices of scanning books into digital format and presenting snippets of those scans in search results because the practices qualify as fair use. It's an exciting and hard-fought victory for Google, one that took nearly a decade of litigation and many millions of dollars to achieve. Still, this ruling merely preserves the status quo, last year a related case (the HathiTrust case) already found fair use for similar facts, and a Second Circuit ruling earlier this year signaled that Google probably would qualify for a fair use defense. So is this ruling a big deal? Yes and no.
